Innovation Farming

Nurturing ideas to fruition, like growing plants, is a complex process that relies on a suitable substrate and favorable growth conditions.

Written byBob Grant

| 4 min read

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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