Bruce Vojak closes our three-part Serial Innovators series with the playbook for finding and protecting breakthrough talent: the five core traits to look for, the four engagement filters that actually identify a serial innovator, why HR and AI hiring screens filter them out, and the manager behaviours — air cover, patience, no “J work” — that keep them from walking out the door.
Most innovators believe a great idea will sell itself. Bruce Vojak, co-author of Serial Innovators, joins Aidan McCullen to reveal why that belief will get you fired — and how the rare few who repeatedly deliver breakthrough innovations inside mature firms actually navigate the organisational politics that stop everyone else cold.
Bruce Vojak returns for a short bonus episode on the Hourglass Model — the descriptive state diagram he and his co-authors built to explain how serial innovators actually move from a customer problem to a launched product, without the prescriptive rigidity of stage-gate.
Bruce Vojak, co-author of Serial Innovators, explains why roughly 1 in 500 employees inside a large mature firm — with no formal mandate, often almost fired — create most of the breakthrough products that fund everything else.