Bruce Vojak, co-author of Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms, has spent over a decade interviewing the rare individuals roughly 1 in 500 employees inside a large mature firm who create most of the breakthrough products that fund everything else. They have no formal mandate. They are often almost fired. And without them, the S-curve flatlines.
This is part one of a three-part series with Bruce on his life’s work, originally researched with co-authors Ray Price and Abby Griffin at the University of Illinois.
What is a serial innovator?
Bruce defines innovation as something new to the market and to customer use that people are willing to pay for and that, in the best cases, redefines the basis of competition. A creative idea is not yet an innovation. A serial innovator is the rare individual who repeatedly creates breakthrough products inside large organisations, finding important problems, inventing solutions, navigating corporate politics, and shepherding ideas to market without a formal mandate to do so.
He uses the humble carrot peeler to make the point. The kitchen knife was the original tool. Someone reframed the problem and invented the safety peeler. Decades later, an inventor whose wife had arthritis bolted on an ergonomic handle and created a new business. Then someone made pre-peeled baby carrots. Each step changed not the product, but the rules of the game.
“These are the most important people you’ve never heard of.” – Bruce Vojak
Why stage-gate fails breakthrough work
Bruce walks through the classic stage-gate process fuzzy front end on the left, structured gates on the right and the three archetypal roles inside it: the inventor (often technical), the champion (often market-facing) and the implementer (often a project manager). Stage-gate works beautifully for incremental innovation, where you are optimising within an existing paradigm.
What he and his co-authors found, however, is that serial innovators do not stay in their lane. They play across all three roles. They start from a deep customer insight, bounce between technology and market, kill their darlings without sentiment, and stay tethered to the work right through implementation so the original idea is not corrupted on the way to market.
Tom Osborne, the diaper paradigm and the love-letter quote
The clearest example in the book is Tom Osborne, a PhD physical chemist who joined Procter & Gamble after a postdoc with Nobel laureate Harold Urey and ended up in feminine hygiene products. The team there had inherited what Bruce calls a “diaper paradigm” — a product designed to catch fluid. Tom’s intuition told him this was the wrong model. He went deep into the biology, reframed the product as a garment rather than a diaper, and almost lost his job twice for it. The result was the Always Ultra brand a billion-dollar product that nearly never happened.
“My products are love letters to my customers.” – Tom Osborne, P&G, as told to Bruce Vojak
Bruce calls this orientation “customering” not marketing, not market research, but a refusal to stop short of deeply understanding the human being who will use the product.
The MP5 model: what serial innovators bring vs. what they develop
To describe these people, Bruce, Ray Price and Abby Griffin built the MP5 model: motivation, personality, perspectives, preparation, process and politics. The first four tend to be intrinsic curiosity, tolerance for ambiguity, systems thinking, persistence, an idealistic-and-pragmatic worldview, internal motivation, and a “multiply deep and broad” knowledge base. Process and politics are developed on the job, often reluctantly. Most serial innovators are, by personality, allergic to politics. They take it on because it is the only way to actually serve the customer.
Bruce draws repeated parallels to Iain McGilchrist’s left and right hemisphere distinction the same exploit-versus-explore tension that runs through every mature firm.
What this means for leaders, HR and boards
If you run a mature firm, the takeaway is uncomfortable. Most of your incremental machine is correctly designed. But the boundary you draw around it the politics, the metrics, the calendar, the “stay in your lane” reflex is quietly draining the very people who will create your next billion-dollar brand.
Bruce’s hiring insight from one of his interviewees should reframe every job description:
“I want people not who want to be an innovator, but who want to do the work that innovators do.”
About Bruce Vojak
Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators and Innovation Code, founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering. He advises executive teams and boards on how to find, support and unleash serial innovators inside mature firms.
Listen and watch
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- Thursday Thought on Substack — for a chance to win a copy of Serial Innovators, with thanks to our sponsor Kyndryl
Related episodes
- Iain McGilchrist on The Master and His Emissary the left/right brain framework Bruce repeatedly references
- Charles Handy on the Second Curve the S-curve language that runs through both books
- Jeff DeGraff on the Innovation Genome complementary view on innovation tensions
- Chuck House on Defiant Innovators at HP the prototype “punished for being right” innovator
Frequently asked questions
What is a serial innovator?
A serial innovator is a rare individual roughly 1 in 500 employees inside a large mature firm, according to Bruce Vojak’s research who repeatedly creates breakthrough products inside large organisations without holding formal authority. They find important problems, invent solutions, navigate corporate politics, and shepherd ideas to market.
Who is Bruce Vojak?
Bruce Vojak is co-author of Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms, founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering. He has spent over a decade studying breakthrough innovation inside mature firms.
What is the MP5 model?
The MP5 model is Bruce Vojak, Ray Price and Abby Griffin’s framework for describing serial innovators across six dimensions: motivation, personality, perspectives, preparation, process and politics. The first four are largely intrinsic; process and politics are developed on the job.
Why does stage-gate fail for breakthrough innovation?
Stage-gate is designed to optimise within an existing paradigm — perfect for incremental innovation. Breakthrough innovation requires moving non-linearly between deep customer insight, technology, market validation and implementation, often killing and reformulating the project mid-process. Serial innovators play across the inventor, champion and implementer roles simultaneously rather than handing off between them.
What is “customering”?
“Customering” is Bruce Vojak’s term for the orientation that distinguishes serial innovators: not marketing, not market research, but a refusal to stop short of deeply understanding the individual human being who will use the product. The phrase comes from Tom Osborne at P&G, who described his products as “love letters to his customers.”