Wing K. Lee, Director of Innovation Realization at Sprint spoke today about innovation’s need for collaboration in order to be realized by markets. He said that there are four attributes necessary for market innovation:

• Inventor
• Transformer
• Financier
• Distributor

Listen to Wing’s entire presentation at the iRise conference (Time: 37 minutes).

Problem is no one individual or company can do all four. At most, you can hope to be able to do two. You need outside people to realize talent to make it happen. So for example, inventors need financiers and distributors. Rarely is that person all one in the same. Lee gave the example of The Beatles’ impact on rock ‘n roll. While they were the inventors, they were not the distributors. They needed The Ed Sullivan Show to distribute them to America. After that, music around the world changed.

Lee advises us not to try to play too many roles ourselves when it comes to innovation. Instead, we should look to community, to collaboration, to enable innovation to reach markets and critical mass.

Lee closed his presentation with a video entitled “Did You Know?/Shift Happens” produced by Kyle Fisch.