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Ultimately, innovation depends on the people with advanced skills who have the ideas, and on the business risk-takers willing to back them.

Most companies don't have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.

Your innovation can create new winners and losers; or at the very least, make existing companies look fresh and innovative by partnering with you. Everyone wants to align with market makers.

Innovation is this amazing intersection between someone's imagination and the reality in which they live. The problem is, many companies don't have great imagination, but their view of reality tells them that it's impossible to do what they imagine.

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend.

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.

Companies have to be innovative in leading with values the same way they have to be innovative in their products and services.

So, it's a very, you know - maybe we're wrong in - you know, we go around thinking the innovator is the person who's first to kind of conceive of something. And maybe the innovation process continues down the line to the second and the third and the fourth entrant into a field.

The world needs a better understanding of how to encourage innovation. And innovators need to get better at it. Sign me up.

Innovation happens because there are people out there doing and trying a lot of different things.