Ideas in the Wild: Author Bob Moesta is Making Innovation Easier by Teaching 5 Crucial Skills

Entrepreneurship and innovation is a journey — but it shouldn’t be a solo trip. If an innovator or entrepreneur is missing something, struggling to begin, or has reached a plateau, fellow entrepreneur and innovator Bob Moesta knows their next steps because he’s been there himself.

Bob has coached entrepreneurs for 20 years and developed more than 3,500 new products. He’s experienced success because of the insight his mentors have shared with him, and now he’s paying it forward.

In Learning to Build, Bob shares the five fundamental skills every successful innovator practices to be their best. Just as importantly, he provides the resources needed for anyone to learn these skills, grow through experience, and adapt their mindset. I recently caught up with Bob to learn more about why he wrote the book and the ideas he shares with readers.

Why did you write this book?

Throughout my more-than-30-year career developing and launching over 3,500 products and services, I’ve come across thousands of other innovators and entrepreneurs. The top 10 stand out to me, just as my key mentors stood out. One day, I intentionally took a step back and asked myself, “What do these people think or do differently from others? What skills do they possess?”

Upon reflection, I narrowed it down to five subtle skills that set them apart. These are the hidden parts of innovation that nobody seems to teach in an in-depth way — the stuff in between innovation tools and processes. I believe that they are the things that differentiate successful innovators and entrepreneurs from being typical engineers, software developers, or CEOs.

The goal of this book is to take an in-depth look at these five skills and why they are so important. By calling out these five skills, I want to impart the importance of the role that they play; it’s the rigor and depth behind them that I wish to convey.

The skills of innovators and entrepreneurs that are taught in this book are the things that gave me an approach and guardrails for building and creating and allowed me to adapt. Now I have little fear. When I walk into a situation, I’m humble enough to know that I don’t have the answers, but these five skills provide me the confidence to know that I will discover the answer. And, if you learn to embrace and implement them, I know they’ll do the same for you.

What’s an idea you share that really excites you?

The best innovators and entrepreneurs have the ability to see around corners and see through space and time. Their power comes from what I call “supply-side empathetic perspective.”

The benefits to such a perspective are vast. It allows you to see every situation from multiple points of view. And, it allows you to utterly understand the many perspectives (customers, team members, engineers, and so on) that could impact your system and your product. That means you can see conflicts and problems before they arise.

There are a few ways to advance your ability to see empathetically. For example, you can pick a family member and try to understand their perspective on any topic. A great place to start is to talk to your child and uncover the progress they want to make with school or a sport. What are their goals? It’s been a long time since you were a kid, and the reality of their perspective is completely different than what you experienced.

You can also talk to a grandparent to uncover a big moment in their life. Try to empathetically understand why that moment was important. Or, the next time that you have a disagreement, make sure that you understand the situation from the other person’s perspective without judgment or attempting to change their mind.

Another great way to practice is to go to a place where you are unfamiliar, maybe a vacation in a city or country very dissimilar to where you live, and interact with people. Immersing yourself in different scenarios enables you to see empathetically.

Aside from conversing with people, you can also consider taking an improv class; playing different roles and being in different contexts helps immensely. Also, you can read a story from a different time and place, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and try to understand the main character’s motivations and emotions.

No matter which of these techniques you try, keep in mind that your goal is to be an empty vessel. You are there to talk, interact, unpack, and see what they are trying to do. You are not there to convince them that you are right and they are wrong.

How will following your advice improve your readers’ lives?

It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to make dinner, write a book, or even buy a house. The five skills I describe in the book are at the core of making life better. Yet they are the things that are in between, that no one seems to talk about. Most people consider this the “art” of innovation.

The reason that these skills are so elusive is precisely because they are so intertwined; they happen so quickly that people don’t even recognize them as separate things. But when you separate the five skills and make them explicit, they enable you to take everything to the next level.

Overall, I see these skills not just as the key to innovation and entrepreneurship, but as the foundational skills to a happy life. They help you make progress; they help you help others make progress, which in turn makes you happy. Life is about a series of tradeoffs that you make, not the magic of getting it all. No one has everything.