We want innovation, but without the innovators

Academics and media seem more interested in moralizing than inspiring

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The following is a guest post from Dave Van de Walle. He’s a corporate communications and social media professional who works in the Chicago area. His background includes integrated marketing communications work ranging from Fortune 500 companies to startups, and in industries including financial services and fintech, professional services, health care, and college athletics. A “recovering sportscaster,” Dave holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Broadcast Journalism from Syracuse University.

You can find Dave on Substack here, on Twitter/X here, on LinkedIn here, on YouTube here.

So there I was, scrolling through LinkedIn, when up popped a post from a college professor. To go TL;DR on the professor’s post: he doesn’t like Elon Musk.

It’s an oversimplification of the professor’s LinkedIn post, but it’s also a symptom of three problems: (1) People conflating assumed beliefs of innovators with their actual innovations; (2) Categorically ignoring audiences because of the assumed beliefs of the audience; and (3) College professors projecting their personal POV on unsuspecting young students.

With all due fairness to the Professor – an individual I’ve never met, nor interacted with online (though I expect that to change soon, possibly after this gets posted) – the LinkedIn post puts what’s important on the backburner and, instead, suggests that emotion should win out; and, because of things like the election and DOGE and strong negative feelings, markets, customers, and audiences should be ignored because…reasons. An undertone here as well is that founders can only stay in our good graces if they continue to agree with consensus politics of institutions (this does feel like the perspective of a modern academic).

Disruptive innovation

Ralph Lauren is a great marketer, great brand-builder, great fashion designer. Is he more innovative than Alexander Julian? Remember him? He designed the uniforms for the Charlotte Hornets in exchange for shipments of Carolina barbecue; his argyle design for the University of North Carolina Basketball team – created in the 1990s – is considered one of the greatest uniforms ever created in sports. (You could maybe argue that Julian, while not as financially successful, might have been at least as innovative as Ralph Lauren.)

Yes, Ralph Lauren is synonymous with his own timeless, iconic brand; Levi Strauss, also, is synonymous with his own timeless, iconic brand. At the expense of an entire MBA class in marketing or communications (more on that later), Strauss would win the Lauren vs. Strauss innovation contest.

Quick Google searches of both can help you decide whether either had political leanings that might have leered “sharply rightward” – did you know that Levi Strauss was born in pre-Germany Bavaria? My goodness! – if that’s your thing. Or you could, you know, ask yourself whether the goods are quality or the fashion is your thing.

Clayton Christensen wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma and came up with the concept of disruptive innovation; if you think about the Model T and how it replaced the horse-drawn carriage, you get the concept of a disruptive innovation.

On the newly created Disruptive Innovation Scale – which I just created right now – 1 to 10, 1 being barely disruptive innovation, 10 being off-the-charts disruptive, maybe the following scores are fair for the innovators mentioned above:

• Ralph Lauren: 2

• Alexander Julian: 2

• Levi Strauss: 6

(Yes, Levi Strauss was way more disruptive an innovator than Ralph Lauren.)

Innovator man bad

Which brings us to the concept of Innovator Man Bad. Think about that in the same vein of Orange Man Bad, which is a way some describe the broad brush strokes that get used against President Trump, his policies, or the guilt-by-association verdict applied to those in his orbit.

Like Elon Musk.

To those who are spiritually blinded by All Things Left, everything Elon Musk does is…bad. “He didn’t build Tesla, after all,” which is akin to saying Henry Ford failed because Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile. (Also, let’s give Henry Ford a Disruptive Innovation Scale score of…8.) Musk (Disruptive Innovation Scale score of…9 at least) didn’t put SpaceX on the map – or take its rockets off the map, natch – because other people have done the rocketry thing before and I saw that one movie about space once and…

Stop. It.

Innovator Man Bad applies the same warped logic that gets applied to a whole host of other issues. If Elon doesn’t agree with me politically, his businesses must be failures; We must ignore the past – Tesla innovated the concept of the electric vehicles and the company has 45% market share in the USA – because we don’t like the future that we’ve imagined him to be creating. And we’re using Elon for this post because it’s today’s quintessential example, but it’s not just him, media and academics seem hostile to many entrepreneurs and builders these days (creatives vs bureaucrats).

Which is interesting…because the future that he was creating up until the election of Donald Trump was one that…minimizes our reliance on fossil fuels; these are the very fossil fuels that – again, up until January 20, 2025 – we were wholeheartedly ready to minimize our reliance on, and Musk was going to help make that possible.

(Yes, Tesla sales dropped in Q1 as the professor points out. And there was a reason, as evidenced by the screenshot below.)

But what about the ‘X’ factor?

Oh, that. Twitter was Twitter, Elon “let that sink in” and the rest is history. (The “sink” cost Elon $44 Billion.) One side thinks it’s a cesspool of right wing hate speech and the other side thinks it’s the town square AND responsible (in part) for the demise of mainstream media.

But the innovator…actually innovated at Twitter: cutting the staff, focusing on the product, opening up the free speech spigots – warts and all – and growing ad revenue.

The broad brush strokes applied to Innovator Man Bad in this case meant a mass exodus from Twitter, which changed its name to X (alienating bird fans), unbanned a whole host of people (including President Trump), and now had to face competition from competitors with a more palatable ethos. Like Bluesky. (To be fair, Bluesky got a late start and didn’t have the advantage of, say, Threads, which has an order of magnitude more users, but is built on the back of Instagram.)

No matter how you slice the X numbers, they’re much, much bigger.

But…again…Innovator Man Bad.

Ignore the audience at your peril

Those X user numbers are hard to ignore. Those X advertising growth numbers are hard to ignore.

Yet, brands said “see ya!” to X because of politics or because of Elon or because of both; and the result is a complete misread of modern marketing and communications. Our craft isn’t supposed to be political, we’re supposed to be data-driven and dispassionate. Marketers are capitalists not activists.

X users get painted with the same broad brushstrokes as Tesla owners, who now find themselves subject to ridicule and even violence. Because of Elon’s ability to mainstream an electric vehicle? It’s all so odd.

This is quite a user base. Sure, the US has 330 million residents, give or take, and even if only 2 million are driving electric vehicles, the growth of EVs over the past ten years is pretty staggering. And a good chunk of that is due to Elon Musk.

And you could guess that a good chunk of those EV drivers did so because they like the environment.

All EV Drivers Are Granolas! All X Users Are Right-Wing Trolls! All Fox News Viewers Are Evil!

Wait, here we are with the broad brushstrokes again, but this time it’s about Fox News, which we can use as an example of ignoring an audience at your peril.

Think of this as Innovator Man Bad but it’s actually an Entire Network Bad because…only evil people watch it?

The least-watched show on Fox News has more viewers than the most-watched show on CNN. Not all these people are “evil,” they’re fellow citizens. They change your tires and conduct your medical scans.

We could go on, but the problem here is claiming that you have the ethical or moral high ground and assuming that others that don’t think the same…don’t. And they should be shunned, quieted, or ignored.

When the innovators and college professors are miles apart

I’m a PR guy by trade. I have been for 30-plus years – with perhaps a title change, maybe a little “integrated marketing” thrown in here or there, and a slight detour to run a startup – and I would venture to say I have picked up a couple things along the way. Some of it what to do, some of it what NOT to do.

I also hold a degree in Communications – “Broadcast Journalism” is what my diploma says – but never once set foot in a PR class. Funny how that works.

I had two great communications courses in school: one was writing for broadcast – which came in handy for blogging years later – and the other was an actual newscast course. (Tapes have been destroyed.)

I realized very early on that I was going to get the best experience by working outside of the classroom. Not saying I have disdain for the professorial class but…well, the more academic and professorial you are in PR, the less I actually care about what you have to say.

Here then, the final point of the article: quite a few people are not living in the real world. It’s a problem.

It’s been said that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy; most formal education ends up suggesting that the real world should be a certain way, but the real world turns out to be…not that way. Not that way at all.

If your theory is that Elon is bad, but you get into the real world and see that he’s actually one of the most disruptive innovators we’ve ever seen, you may need to rethink your approach.

If your theory is that one shouldn’t be synonymous with a business they birthed, or helped birth, you may need to ask whether the disruptive innovators had any choice in the matter: Lauren, Strauss, Ford, and (yes) Musk all had no choice in the matter. Their innovation was disruptive enough to create a brand with their name on it that wasn’t merely a personal brand, but a category creator, a market leader, and an innovator. Once they leave the innovation leaves with them.

Time to get out more, perhaps. Check out the people in the other bubbles, consider what’s happening on other platforms, and ask whether you’re suffering from tunnel vision.

Talk to someone you are pretty certain you don’t agree with politically or philosophically, and find out what makes them tick. Have a discussion – not a debate – about the why behind their POV. Be prepared to find common ground and if you do part as friends (or just friendly acquaintances) try to without thinking less of the other.

Unless they drive a Cybertruck, because those things are ugly.*

*that was a joke