On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft.⁠↗

Settlers are brilliant people. They can turn the half baked thing into something useful for a larger audience. They build trust. They build understanding. They make the possible future actually happen. They turn the prototype into a product, make it manufacturable, listen to customers and turn it profitable. Their innovation is what we tend to think of as applied research and differentiation. They built the first ever computer products (e.g. IBM 650 and onwards), the first generators (Hippolyte Pixii, Siemens Generators).

The more pioneers there are (both inside and outside) the bigger the ecosystem around your component is. This will not only give you greater economies of scale but you can mine the ecosystem to identify future success (it operates as a future sensing engine). If you don’t know how, read up on the ILC model here.

By creating this virtuous cycle which is incentivised so that each group steals the work of the former - town planners stealing from settlers who steal from pioneers who build on the work of town planners - you can accelerate innovation, customer focus and efficiency all at the same time and remove the threat of inertia to change.

Each group has a different culture. I hear endless stuff about company culture. Go ask special forces, infantry and police whether they have the same culture or not.