How I Came to Innovation

FIELD NOTE 001 · ORIGINS

I grew up in a very small town where life moved slowly. The nearest big city was about an hour and a half away, and we rarely went. There was no internet or cable television, and much of what surrounded me felt familiar and predictable. So I read. Books gave me a glimpse of how people lived beyond the world I could see. I explored the woods, watched animals and insects, took photographs, crocheted, and made clothes for my dolls.

When my mother bought me a sewing machine at around thirteen, I spent hours using it. I did not think of any of this as innovation. I was simply curious, and making things gave me a way to create something that had not been there before.

Looking back, I can see how much those early experiences shaped me. Resources influence what people are able to do, but imagination can help us see beyond what is immediately available. I learned to pay attention to what was around me and to wonder what else might be possible.

That same curiosity drew me toward people. For a long time, I thought I would study psychology. I was a quiet observer, partly because children were often expected to be seen and not heard. I watched how people interacted. I wondered why some people were kind and others were not. I noticed how children sometimes reflected the behavior of the adults around them. I wanted to understand what shaped people and why they behaved the way they did.

My first professional job was as a behavioral counselor. That experience taught me something simple that still influences how I work today: sometimes people do not need to be corrected or judged. They need to know that someone is listening. I think about that often in research and innovation work. Listening is usually described as something we do so that we can gather information. But listening is also a form of respect. It tells another person that their experience matters enough to influence what happens next.

At the same time, I was drawn to a very different kind of problem solving. That search eventually led me to Engineering. For years, I experienced those interests as separate. There was the part of me that cared about people, behavior, creativity, language, and art. Then there was the part that wanted to understand how things worked, solve technical problems, and make something tangible.

Consumer product development was where those two sides finally came together. I could see people working to understand what consumers wanted and needed, scientists translating those needs into formulations and prototypes, and engineers figuring out how to make those products reliably and at scale. Suddenly, the connection seemed obvious. Understanding people and making things were not competing interests. They were different parts of the same work.

That changed how I understood innovation. It was not simply about inventing something or proving that something could be made. It was about paying close enough attention to people to understand what would actually be useful, meaningful, or better, and then figuring out how to make that possible.

Early in my career, I still thought the path itself was fairly straightforward: understand the consumer, identify the unmet need, develop the technology, create the product, test it, improve it, and launch it. The work was hard, but the logic made sense. Listen carefully. Understand the problem. Build something better. There was much more I would eventually learn about what happens to an idea as it moves through teams, decisions, organizations, and systems. But that came later.

The first lesson was simpler, and it has stayed with me: Innovation begins with paying attention. To people. To what they are experiencing. To what is missing. To what they are trying to accomplish. And to the possibilities that may not yet exist. Before innovation became my profession, I was already learning to observe, listen, imagine, and make.

I just did not have a name for it yet.