Sharing an Innovation with Faith in Humanity

The past six months have been so valuable. I've been able to live on my early withdrawal of my retirement, and get my mind back into a good place to innovate. And while there is still the need to gain income again, I have come to realize that the greatest value I likely have for humanity is my skill in seeing past the current reality and imagining solutions to make new futures; in other words: innovation.

That word gets bandied about too much. As Evan Leybourn illuminated in his video about buzzwords, all cliche business words started with a valid initial meaning, before they became overused and misused. But, it is not on me that "innovation" and "innovator" are overused, it is on the people misusing those words. In my case, I believe I have earned the title "innovator". The work I did to innovate how to create an adult serving charter school turned into a multi-million dollar enterprise. Although for exactly that reason, I'm not proud of what it became. It is not that I believe money is bad; money in fact is the lifeblood of organizations, but it should never be their heart.

And for too many businesses, this critical distinction is crossed. But, there are a growing number of others that are not foregoing ethics for profit, but balancing the two. I believe overall Patreon is one of these, and that is why this morning I used a few of my in-mail credits to reach out to them with an innovative idea that I believe can help them, help nonprofits, and help small businesses and very small businesses (even solopreneurs and gig workers). This is a bit of one of the messages I sent:

I am a fan of Patreon (and Pomplamoose). So I wanted to approach you all first before starting a business that could be a competitor. I ask that if the following ideas is intriguing to you, that you work with me on it, instead of "stealing" it. I trust you all because I have seen how Jack Conte legitimately tries to help other artists, and how Sam Yam works to help startups with Y Combinator. Here is the idea: Patreon could expand more into supporting nonprofits, by having small businesses and solopreneurs have sponsorships (including micro-sponsorships). Patreon would then have a few features. First it would make sure that the nonprofit had all sponsors shown, so that the small business / solopreneur can legitimately claim this sponsorship as a good will advertising expense on their taxes, and to support this, it would also have a page for each small business / solopreneur to show who they sponsor, and more importantly, to have a way to download their sponsorship data in ways that could be used by their accounting software, to make the tax deductions easy for them to track.

I know I could try to patent my idea, or do it on my own, and that there is risk that they will take the idea and run with it. Although, my experience with innovative ideas, is that far more often others don't recognize their value at first! So there is greater chance that what I'm sharing will be ignored, than that it will be "stolen". The same goes with posting this article. Further, the history of innovation shows that often more than one person independently comes up with an idea, so to not try to do something with it quickly, that is a real risk.

I think there is much wisdom in this quote by J.A. Shedd:

A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

As is true of ships, is true of ideas and innovations.