What You’ll Find This Week

If your career has taken you across industries, disciplines, or org types that don't usually talk to each other, you already know how poorly the standard tools handle your story. Job boards weren't built for it. LinkedIn wasn't designed for it. The resume format actively works against it.

You've probably spent more time than you'd like trying to compress twenty years of cross-functional, cross-industry work into a format built for someone whose career went in a straight line. And the thing that makes you genuinely valuable, the range, the pattern recognition, the ability to see the same problem differently because you've watched it fail in four other industries, is exactly what gets lost in translation.

This week, we're opening submissions for something launching soon. Discover an Innovator will be a curated section of this newsletter: profiles of innovation professionals who are ready for what's next, written in a format that asks the questions a good hiring conversation would actually get to. Submissions are open now, and we want yours to be one of them.

Here’s what you’ll find:

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I keep having a version of the same conversation.

The details change every time. Different industries, different problems, different organizations. But the shape of the person is consistent: someone whose job, in one form or another, is innovation. Not working on an innovative product or company, though they might be. The actual function. The person whose title says ______ of Innovation or some close variation on that theme. The person who was hired specifically to make new things happen, and who has the range necessary to execute on that mandate: cross-industry, cross-functional, hard to reduce to a skills checklist.

I had the latest version of this conversation recently with a guest on the Innovate, Disrupt, or Die podcast, someone who started her career doing computational biology and applying machine learning to biomarker and drug discovery in the early 2000s, before any of that was cool. From there: pharma, oncology, drug launches in breast cancer and melanoma. Then digital health. Then medical devices. Then back around.

LinkedIn doesn't have a field for any of that. There's no box for “I’ve worked the whole patient journey.” No place to put “worked at the intersection of hardware and biologics before that was a thing people said.” The LinkedIn/resume format flattens people like this into a list of titles and dates, which tells you where they’ve been but nothing about how they see and change the world.

She's an innovator. Right now, she's looking for what's next. And she is not alone.

Across all of those conversations, I’ve seen a recurring theme: the infrastructure for organizations to find people like her, and for her to find new opportunities, is completely broken.

The generic job boards surface everything and curate nothing. An "innovation" title means something completely different at a biotech than it does at a consulting firm than it does at a restaurant chain, but the search results don't account that, and neither do most hiring managers who've never hired outside their own industry.

The professional communities that exist for innovation leaders are either invitation-only or pay-to-play. VP or higher, Cape Cod in the summer, and five-thousand-dollar conference tickets. Annual memberships that assume you already have a budget line for them. Great if you're already in the room, or employed by someone willing to pay to put you there. But nearly useless if you're trying to get there on your own.

And LinkedIn has become what it's become: a social media platform that rewards the people most comfortable performing expertise in public, which, as it turns out, is not necessarily the same set of people who are best at the slower, messier, more collaborative work of actually making new things happen inside organizations.

The people who fall through these gaps aren't junior. They're not unaccomplished. They're often exactly the people an organization needs when it has a genuinely hard problem: the ones with the pattern recognition that only comes from having seen the same issue approached differently across four different industries. They're just hard to find, and harder to pitch to a hiring committee that wants a tidy career arc.

Here's what we're doing about it.

We're opening submissions now for Discover an Innovator: a curated directory of innovation professionals who are available for what's next, whether that's a full-time role, a fractional engagement, an advisory relationship, or something they haven't been asked to do yet. The profiles section will launch once we have enough profiles submitted to make it worthwhile. (Which means I need your help!)

Each profile will be written in the person's own words, through a questionnaire designed to surface how they actually think, not just where they've been. The goal is to give innovators a format that generic platforms can't offer: one that treats cross-industry experience as the asset it is, and asks the questions a good hiring conversation would actually get to.

If you're a company looking for innovation talent with unusual range, this is where you can expect to find it.

If you're an innovation professional who's had trouble articulating your story on the platforms you're supposed to use, we'd like to profile you.

Submissions are open now 👇

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