What young innovators know

It doesn’t yet appear to be online, but the latest (September/October) issue of Technology Review has a pithy editorial summarizing what the editors have learned from the outstanding young innovators they’ve identified (this is the issue where they name 35 outstanding young innovators under 35) (and you’d be right, if you imagined that this article makes me feel old…):

1) Successful innovators are famously untroubled by the prospect of failure

2) Many innovators appreciate failure (a theme that Sharon Daloz Parks' research also affirms)

3) Innovators commonly recognize that "problems and questions are the limiting resource in innovation" -- meaning that what we really need are people who can name hard questions and difficult problems

4) Innovators find inspiration in diverse disciplines

5) Innovation flourishes when organizations allow third-party experiments with their products

6) Fragility is the enemy of innovation: systems should boast broad applications and be unbreakable

7) Real innovators delight in giving us what we want: solutions to our difficulties, and expansive alternatives to our established ways

8) Innovators are sometimes, it's true, perplexed by our ignorance of our own needs

9) Successful innovators do not depend on what economists call "network externalities" (where a system, like a fax machine, has little use to its first user but becomes increasingly valuable as more people use it)

10) Many innovators become technologists because they want to better the world

So what might religious innovators draw from this? Clearly people who are starting new faith communities, or fundamentally changing a particular program, or trying something new with their own spiritual practices value the possible potential benefit more than the risk of losing something. Further, learning from failure is valuable in a way that seminary never seems to recognize, let alone support. Asking hard questions ought to be at the heart of our journey, not something to be avoided (which is far too often where the RC Church finds itself these days). Religious innovators are looking all around them for ways to image God, and for clues to what God might be up to in this world of ours. Asking questions and engaging in dialogue across religious boundaries is more than a "nice thing", it's necessary. If fragility is the enemy, so too is lightly engaged faith. The most painful dilemmas of religious identity usually arise when people have brittle identities, and narrowly conceived truths, "premature ultimates," to use Hull's term. If real innovators delight in giving us what we want, and in the process expanding our alternatives, than religious innovators would do well to help us listen to our deepest desires and yearnings, rather than settling for superficial wants.

I could go on, but this is a start. What would you draw from the editorial?