I’m an innovators’ nurturer, I help companies improve the effectiveness of their innovators. For the decade I’ve been doing this job, the most common request I get from the managers who hire me is “make my innovators be influential.” These managers run departments and teams of technologists (scientists, engineers, developers, etc.) whose job is to innovate for their companies. They usually come to me when these innovators have become ineffective, unable to demonstrate the business value of their work. The managers’ assumption is that their innovators have poor communication skills. But in my experience, this is rarely the issue. The real issue is that innovators are unable to see and understand the perspectives of the stakeholders that their ideas must go through. This is a major barrier to their success as innovators due to the way companies are set up. Companies are structured in silos: each one will have its own objectives, resources, offices and even subculture. Within these silos you will have disparate groups of stakeholders with divergent productivity criteria that innovators have to meet to develop and take their ideas to market. The bigger the company, the larger the number of stakeholders. Innovators are not trained to deal with this. They are trained to develop specialized technical mastery.