The Foundations of Innovation Series

  A year-long series on the ideas that built the startup world and the one idea still missing from them all.

 For nearly a century, the greatest minds in economics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and organizational theory have been circling the same problem.

How do we understand innovation? How do we enable it? How do we sustain it across people, organizations, and time?

Each generation added something essential. Schumpeter gave us the theory of creative destruction and named the entrepreneur as the engine of economic change. 

March gave us the exploration-exploitation framework and showed why organizations that only do one eventually fail. 

Christensen mapped how disruption works at the market level. 

Kahneman explained why human decision making is systematically biased in ways that matter enormously under uncertainty. 

Drucker gave us the knowledge worker and argued that managing knowledge would be the defining challenge of the modern economy.

Ries gave founders a methodology for iterating toward product-market fit. 

Each contribution moved the conversation forward. None of them closed it.

What remains unsolved, what every one of these thinkers approached but none fully addressed, is the problem at the individual founder level. Before the organization exists. Before the product is built. Before the first customer has paid. At the moment when a person decides to build something that does not yet exist, with incomplete information, limited resources, and a set of assumptions about the world that may or may not be true.

That moment is where most of the work needs to happen. And that is precisely where almost none of the infrastructure exists.

The thinking, the pattern recognition, the decision-making clarity required to build a coherent company from nothing has historically been available only to founders who had access to the right advisors at the right moment, who got into the right accelerator, who built in the right city, who knew the right people. 

Many startup ecosystems around the world have done remarkable work making that access more available. But even the best of them reach only a fraction of the founders who need it. Not because the knowledge itself was scarce, but because no system exists to deliver it at scale, to every founder, regardless of where they were building or who they happened to know.

That is the gap this series exists to examine.

The Foundations of Innovation is a year-long series of weekly essays tracing the intellectual history of that gap. I am going to try my best to think through and write one piece every week taking a thinker or idea that shaped how we understand innovation, entrepreneurship, or learning, honor what they got right, identify what they left open, and ask what closing that gap would actually require.

I’ve sketched out a lot of the series and hope to draw on entrepreneurship, economics, organizational theory, philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, sociology, complexity theory, and education research. 

I hope it can be, in one sense, an intellectual history of a problem that has been accumulating for a hundred years. And, in another sense, an argument, built piece by piece across fifty-two essays, that we are finally, for the first time, in a position to solve it.

Not by contradicting the giants whose shoulders we stand on.

By completing what they started.

A note on what this series will not be

This is not going to be a series of startup tactics, growth frameworks, or productivity advice. There are not going to be any listicles, no ten-step frameworks, no promises of a shortcut to product-market fit.

What this series hopes to offer is something rarer and, I would argue, more valuable: a rigorous examination of the ideas that should be informing how we think about building startups, but mostly are not. The kind of thinking that used to require a PhD program or a world-class advisor to access. Made available here, one essay at a time, to anyone willing to engage seriously with the ideas.

The founders who build the most durable companies are not the ones who moved fastest or raised the most money or had the most charismatic vision. They are the ones who thought most clearly about the right problems at the right moments. This series is about building that capacity, not through inspiration, but through the discipline of engaging with the foundational ideas that make clear thinking possible.

Where we are going

Over the next year, I aim to move this series through the work of nearly 50 thinkers. Economists and philosophers. Organizational theorists and cognitive scientists. Sociologists and educators. Some are famous. Others are really only known within their disciplines. All of them have something essential to say about the problem of building something new in a world that resists it.

Next week, we will begin where the argument begins, with Schumpeter, who named the routinization of innovation as the direction the economy was heading and was right about the destination but wrong about who would benefit. 

I aim to write each essay to stand alone. But together build toward something larger than any individual piece.

The mission behind all of it is simple, even if the work required to achieve it is not.

The routinization of innovation. 

To make the thinking, the pattern recognition, and the decision-making clarity that the best founders in the world have always had access to available to every founder, at every stage, in every moment they need it.

Not talent. Not luck. Not connections.

A discipline. A system. A practice.

That is what this series is building toward.

I hope you will follow along.

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About the Author

Dr. Shaun P. Digan is the founder of Startup.Ready and the creator of the Startup Readiness Framework, a research-based system for evaluating and strengthening the foundations of early-stage startups. He holds a PhD in Entrepreneurship from the University of Louisville and has spent 15 years teaching, advising, and consulting with founders. In this series, The Foundations of Innovation, he writes on the ideas that built the startup world and the one idea still missing from all of them.

Next week, Issue 1: What Schumpeter Got Wrong About the Routinization of Innovation. While he named the direction innovation was heading more clearly than anyone before him, time suggests that he was wrong about almost everything else.