Boundary Crossers: The Innovation Roles We Don’t Talk About Enough
Are you a beaver or a bat?
Innovation is not a linear pipeline—it’s a loopy living system. Like nature, it moves through cycles of emergence, growth, integration, and renewal. It requires ecosystem thinking, adaptive capacity, and resilience. For a system to evolve, the handoffs between phases must be healthy. The transitions—between chaos and order, possibility and practice—are where most things fall apart. Or take flight.
In The Insider’s Guide to Innovation @ Microsoft, we introduced the often-overlooked fourth role of the Pioneers-Settlers-Town Planner taxonomy: the Boundary Crosser. As the name suggests, the boundary crosser is the person who moves between innovation phases and makes the handoffs possible. Not the pioneer starting from nothing. Not the settler creating the first something. Not the town planner preparing for scale. But the person who carries signal, language, and purpose between them.
Why Boundary Crossers Matter
In natural ecosystems, health depends on integration across boundaries—between species, seasons, and systems. Innovation is no different. It needs translators. Movers. Crossers.
They:
Translate language and urgency between mindsets and domains
Carry memory across teams so progress isn’t lost to turnover or politics
Build trust with both sides—pioneers and settlers, settlers and planners
Manage the gaps and negotiate the overlaps
Boundary crossers connect phases, transmit information, and enable mutual thriving. They move through cultures, incentives, and risk models without breaking them—and without being broken by them. Without them, innovation doesn’t happen. It’s a seed with no bloom. It’s a dropped baton.
They move through cultures, incentives, and risk models without breaking them—and without being broken by them.
We believe this role is foundational to how real innovation happens—and we see ourselves in it.
Dean and I have worked together for years. We share a mission, a rhythm, and a fierce commitment to building things that matter. We are both Boundary Crossers. But when we talk about how we fit into the system, we’re different species.
Dean is a beaver. I am a bat.
Beavers
In nature, beavers are ecosystem engineers, system transformers. They alter the river to make new habitats that attract others and support their wellbeing. They build the infrastructure that helps integrate the existing with the new to create sustainable change. In other words, they operate in the "from something to scale" phase of innovation.
Dean resonates with this role. He’s brilliant at translating between settlers and planners. He knows how to get people aligned, how to connect compliance to creativity, and how to ensure nothing of value is lost in the move from pilot to real-world deployment.
If you want to bring an idea to life and keep it alive, you want a beaver like Dean.
Bats
Bats live in the space between nothing and something. They work at night, at the edge, sensing what others don’t. They use intuition and radar to find shape in the fog. As pollinators, they’re critical for ecosystem health and renewal—yet often they’re misunderstood, maligned, and underestimated.
I am a bat. I fly fast and scan wide. I work from generational learnings and pattern recognition. I search for the subtle shifts that signal a change is coming—like finding a flower in the dark—and communicate it to the settlers who can build the first new something.
Like pollination, this work is the catalyst to renewal. If you want to achieve continuous, adaptive innovation, you want a bat like me.
Which One Are You?
We wrote about boundary crossers because we are them. And we found them in every successful team we studied. So, if you’re not the pioneer, settler, or town planner—but instead are a pollinator or an ecosystem engineer—you might just be one of us.
Welcome. Innovation needs you.