ABOVE: © istock.com, ipopba
I am a gardener. I love sowing seeds or digging vulnerable baby plants into rich earth in my backyard. As fellow gardeners will know, the journey from these early phases of growth to the enjoyment of fruits, vegetables, or flowers is seldom a straight line. Successfully growing plants is often punctuated by challenges, frustrations, and failures along the way. As plants struggle to reach maturity, competitors can sap the resources they need to grow, pests and diseases can damage their leaves and stems, and the climate can drown or dehydrate them. Sometimes, even when plants make it to maturity, fruit withers or freezes on the vine.
This same nonlinear trajectory seems to play out in the innovation pipeline as germinal ideas blossom into fully realized commercial products, methods, or technologies. A suitable substrate and growth-conducive environmental conditions (soil and a moist, warm climate in the case ...