The Innovation Economy

October 14, 2026
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The Innovation Economy

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

What is the big picture of where the economy is heading? In this interview with Sean Sheppard of GrowthX and GrowthX Academy we discuss how to be proactive given the huge changes that are occurring beneath the surface.

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So, my guest today is Sean Sheppard, who is founder of GrowthX and GrowthX Academy. Before we go into the topic for today, Sean, introduce everyone to you and give them a sense of who you are and what your background is, okay?
Sure. Hi, Jeff. My name is Sean Sheppard, as he said, Jeff said. I’m the founder of GrowthX and GrowthX Academy. I’m a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, educator, ecosystem builder in Silicon Valley. I started five companies, I’ve had three successful exits. I have a real passion for modernizing education. And, and I’m excited to be here to talk to Jeff about the skills needed to be successful in the innovation economy.
Fascinating. So, folks, before we start, that’s not a Zoom backdrop. I just want to point that out. And as he moved, did you notice any white stuff around his hair or his body? No, that’s real. That’s not fake. See, he’s proving it to you.
Sean, the place I’d like to start is, you know, I’ve been reading the material from the World Economic Forum, and clearly the world is changing, and I know most Americans don’t know that. They think this is just about COVID, and there’s a lot more going on that they’re not conscious of. Let me just start by asking you, where were we, or where are we currently, and where are we heading toward?
Yeah, this isn’t as much like, and like you, I’ve been through the wars for a lot of years on these things, and I’ve seen economic shifts and recessions and global events have various impacts over our lifetime. And I view this much more like 9/11 than I view it like 2008, for example. This is a self-imposed economic crisis that’s been very much driven by fear, fear of the unknown and the uncertainty. I also believe because of that, there’s also the ability to have a self-imposed recovery, and I’m very bullish about that recovery.
But speaking of the World Economic Forum, and I think you and I may have talked about this off-air before, but they’re calling this period the Great Reset. We’ve been through the Great Recession, we’ve been through the Great Society, and now I think we’re going through what is called the Great Reset, which is this opportunity for everybody to rethink everything and reprioritize everything in their life, hopefully for the better. Not just as individuals, but as professionals, as teams, as organizations, to align our personal development, our professional development, our business development, our economic and sustainability and environmental development, as well as societal development in such a way that hopefully everything becomes much more fully aligned. And there is a multiple bottom line to everything that we’re going to be doing.
And I think that that’s going to start happening immediately as people come out of the survival mode and out of triage, and into what’s next for them and their teams and their community and their world. And I think what’s going to drive it all is the digital transformation, and that’s been something that people have been talking about for a decade, but very few have prioritized it. But it’s now, because of the force of how we’ve had to interact, and stay home and stay away from each other, and be digital in our communication methods, we all are now prioritizing ourselves towards it.
And the infrastructure is there to create that opportunity for all of us. It’s been there for some time. That’s why so many people have been able to quickly react and adapt to this new normal, if you will. And so I’m looking for a future where we start to develop things, we become more mindfully aware of who we are, who we care about, what we care about, so that we’re spending this borrowed time we have on this earth in the most productive and meaningful way that we can.
And thus, when we think about where we’ve been, I think of, you know, I go back to Marshall McLuhan and “the medium is the message.” And there was a time where high tech was printing. Matter of fact, there was a time where high tech was the ability to write. There was a writing class in the Bible called, I think it was the Levites in the Bible, that could actually write, and that was high tech. And then we progressed to printing, and industrial society, and fast-forwarding now to internet culture and mobile culture. And you’re talking about transformations from that into different forms of operating in a society where we can, we’re able to express ourselves and gather information more quickly, an information age, as you will. But you’re talking about a different one; you’re talking about an innovation age, where I want to make sure I understand what you mean by that. What’s next? You’re talking about transformation, but what are we transforming to?
Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And the predictions around the Fourth Industrial Revolution, depending on how you choose to react to those, are that 40% of the current jobs that existed in the market will no longer exist; they will be replaced with automation.
And I want you to hear that one, folks: 40% of jobs are to be replaced by automation. What kind of jobs are going to be gone, would you say?
The jobs that don’t require critical thought, emotional intelligence, collaboration, or creativity, or original thought. So it’s the repetitive tasks. Anything that can be automated in the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be.
And that’s not just simply about outsourcing to a less expensive area; those jobs are going to be gone as well.
That is absolutely true. Now, what I will say about that is that I don’t view that as a dire circumstance. I’m a big believer in Paul Zane Pilzer’s unlimited wealth theory of technology creates abundance. And every new generation and technological innovation creates a whole new set of opportunities to solve a whole new set of challenges and problems that are created by that new Industrial Revolution. And I look at the original Industrial Revolution. In America, in 1900, 38% of the jobs, or 40% of the jobs, were agrarian. They were agriculture; they were farming. Today, it’s only 3%.
But we don’t traditionally have 37% unemployment. There are new jobs and new roles for humans in society. They just have to be willing to open themselves up to adapt to what’s in front of them. And that means they have to develop a set of skills that they haven’t necessarily had to develop in the past.
Agreed, and when I think of workers in certain industries, unless you can anticipate where things are going, there’s a lot of pain and suffering that goes on. The classic examples of jobs moving from what’s called the Rust Belt, which by definition indicates that there was a problem there, to the Sun Belt, where everything is light and wonderful, and taxes are much lower, of course, and the workforce is willing to work for less, and the change was—
And the quality of life is higher, yeah.
I’m sorry, I missed that last thing you said.
I was saying, and the quality of life is higher.
Yes, yes.
But the question is always this, right? It’s not how one acts, it’s how they react that defines them. And so when jobs started to leave the Rust Belt, what did people do? They either had to figure out something else to do, or they had to go with the jobs, right? And that’s no different today. It’s up to you how you choose to react to this new reality. It’s not up to anyone else. You can sit there and you can whine, and you can bitch, and you can moan, and you can blame others or the system or whatever, or you can get up, look yourself in the mirror, and pull yourself up and say, “What do I have to do differently to be able to be valuable in this new age?”
You brought up the Bible, which actually triggered something. It triggered for me the parables of talent, which is where the origin of the word “talent” comes from. Talent was a unit of measure. And it literally was a physical unit of measure for frankincense, myrrh, gold—it didn’t matter what it was. A talent was a unit of measure. And so every human is a talent, and there is a unit of measure in all of us that we can tap into. And so the key is, how do you do that? How do you now reskill and upskill yourself to adapt to the new normal and the innovation economy?
And thus I go to, what’s the technology that’s going to generate the innovation economy? So, I tend to think of 5G and AI as being the cornerstones of this, but I’m speaking as an ignoramus here. I’m talking to you as the expert in terms of what’s going to drive this, and then I could see looking at what are the talents that are going to be needed in this new economy, what skills are going to be necessary?
You think about, yes, so 5G certainly is going to change how we communicate and how information moves from A to B. The internet was designed as a place for people to communicate, but it’s actually been used as a place for commerce. And so the internet is going to get completely reinvented all around the idea of the transaction and commerce. It’s already happening underneath the surface with technologies like blockchain and the decentralization of power and control, which I actually think is a wonderful thing for all the world and society.
I mean, the internet wouldn’t be publicly available if the governments of the world knew just how strong and powerful it was at the time. And they don’t know how strong and powerful blockchain is yet, so they’re going to be late to that party, too. And we are going to get the “Napsterization” of the internet, if you will, through the blockchain.
Napster, could you refresh those younger than us as to what Napster was?
Napster attacked the entire music industry by allowing people to share files very easily in an unlicensed manner. And it shook the powers that be in the music industry, in the entertainment industry, because it now allowed people to download content and share it peer-to-peer without having to go through the studios and the music producers and—
The labels, yeah.
The labels, correct. And Sean Parker is the guy that launched that out of Stanford, who’s been a fantastic innovator and done a tremendous amount for us as a whole. He’s one of the creators of the current Opportunity Zone movement that exists to help communities like the Rust Belt come back and reinvent themselves, and innovate themselves into relevance again and into value.
So the idea of decentralization is going to be a big component of that, but artificial intelligence, robotics, anything that automates thought and action is going to replace the human roles for a whole host of reasons. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, 5G—those are certainly some—the blockchain and the decentralization of it all, and then new modern materials that are going to change methods of consumption and energy are going to change everything for all of us, and like I said, in a good way. Those will create new opportunities for other things. So what are those things, right? And that’s really what we’re here to talk about.
There are five key skills.
Number one!
See, there are five. The first and the most important is mindset. So you need to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Well, what does that mean? Dr. Carol Dweck out of Stanford University has done years of work on early childhood development and sociology, trying to understand where and when society beats us up to the point to where we’re no longer allowed to make mistakes, and we become afraid of failure. Because when we’re children, we don’t care about that stuff. You’ll fall an average of 1,100 times a week when you’re trying to walk. You don’t quit and just say, “Screw it, I’m going to crawl,” right? No, you continue until you learn how to walk.
But we don’t do that when we grow up, because society tends to put these parameters around us and put us into what’s called a fixed mindset, where it’s about being afraid to make mistakes. We don’t emphasize learning; we emphasize consumption and knowledge acquisition and education, which is what other people do to you as opposed to learning, which is what you do to yourself. We don’t embrace feedback; we’re afraid of rejection. We take everything personally that happens in the world. We don’t know how to manage the things and separate what we control from what we cannot.
All of those things go into it, and it starts at a young age. When you hear “no,” by the time you’re 17, you hear “no” something like a quarter million times, and you hear “yes” about 2,500 to 25,000 times. So it’s like 10 “no’s” for every “yes.” And that conditions us into this horrible fixed mindset.
And Dweck’s work is to say and return us back to, it’s time to open yourself up for a love of learning, become a lifelong learner. Instead of being a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all. Express this openness to recognize that what you don’t know is more important than what you do, that it’s only failure if you don’t learn from it, and that feedback should replace the word “rejection” in our vocabulary, and we should view feedback as a gift. And we should not be afraid to raise our hand and say, “I don’t know something, but I’m more than happy to learn it.” And it doesn’t matter how old you are or when; a growth mindset is your fastest path to accelerated learning. And accelerated learning is what’s going to get you into a position of relevance and value in this economy. So that’s the first one.
I’m going to pause for a second and say there’s so many places where the willingness to learn, the fear of making a mistake—look, you’re graded in public school or private school based upon your ability to regurgitate a bunch of stuff, or else that note is sent home or you get the bad grade. And the result of the bad grade is you don’t get into the good school, get the good job, go on and—and that message gets drilled in.
And society slots you before you even have any idea what’s hit you. And then you accept that, which is the biggest tragedy of all.
We’re kids; we don’t know any better.
It’s institutional education. I mean, the only thing that a classroom of 30 seventh-graders have in common, Jeff, is their age and their location. How absurd is that? That we bundle all these people together that all have a different learning style, a different brain function, a different way of operating, a different environment, different experiences, a different pace at which they understand and accept and process concepts. I mean, it’s archaic. Our entire educational system was built and designed to take kids off of farms and put them into factories. That’s why there are school bells, to mimic factory whistles. That’s why there’s programmatic, block-based learning based on time and subject, so that you understand an assembly line and you can work on it. And none of that has changed in 150 years.
Amazing, isn’t it? So that’s number one, is the growth mindset. What’s number two?
Number two is business—
You can take a sip of the coffee, it’s okay. It’s morning for you; it’s afternoon for me.
Yes. Number two is business acumen. So understanding how and why and what drives behaviors in organizations that you’re either going to serve, work for, or create on your own, okay? And that is: how does a business work? Why does it do what it does? How is it measured? What is its business model? Who are their customers, and who are their customers’ customers, right? And then, how are you as an individual going to contribute to that?
Stop having this interview-based discussion about your skills and your responsibilities and what you’ve done, and start having a conversation about: what are you trying to accomplish? What are the problems you have? What are the jobs that need to be done? How can I contribute to that in a meaningful way and in a measurable way—talent again, a unit of measure. So understanding how businesses work changes the whole nature of how you look at the world and the conversations that you begin to have as you’re starting to explore opportunities for yourself.

Now, I understand that most skills can be learned, and at the same time, you spoke about an individual and their contribution to a business, and that interviews should be formulated around how that person can serve. But I tend to think of being skills is what institutions still use to evaluate people, and how do they shift in terms of their assessment criteria as to how people can serve them? What becomes the—
They’re starting to understand it, but it’s like anything; it’s like the Titanic—turning it is going to take a long time. But you as an individual can change the conversation instantly on a one-to-one basis with the interviewer, the screener, the recruiter, or the potential employer by asking the right questions that are centered around the business, the business model, the objectives, what drives them, how that gets measured, and how someone like you might be able to contribute to that. And you need to prepare yourself for that. It doesn’t mean just doing standard market research or trying to understand a business, but it means really gaining insights into what drives that behavior.
Very interesting. And what comes to mind for an individual is really getting a sense of their own self-awareness first, so that once they learn the other, they can position themselves, they can present themselves as a solution to those needs. I don’t want to call it solution selling, because that has a different connotation to it, because it’s really not about that, but it’s really about an alliance between parties that allows them to come to a mutual agreement that may not last forever, just like marriage doesn’t always last forever.
That’s right. You’ve got to be able to see the forest through the trees, right? And so you need to have a very strategic approach towards that discussion. It’s not about trying to find a job; it’s about trying to find a fit. And that’s not always easy to do when you’re stuck inside your own head. And that’s part of what a growth mindset does, is create that mindfulness and awareness of: who am I, what am I doing, what’s the impact I have on others, how do I want to contribute?
So the third one is market acumen. And market acumen means how quickly can you become a subject-matter expert in a given domain, industry, sector, product vertical? In today’s environment, in the innovation economy, in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, everybody wants to talk to an expert. They look up to experts, they place them in a certain place. How can you become a thought leader and an actor and a chess player instead of a chess piece in that given market or industry or sector?
So you’ve got to be able to quickly learn how to understand the language of an industry, how they operate—you know, we talked about business acumen: understanding their business model, understanding the ecosystem, understanding all the competition, and becoming an expert in a given domain, and how they speak, how they behave, where they go, what they do.
The quickest and best way to do that is start following the thought leaders in a community, whatever the topic or the keyword is, or the industry or the sector, or the specific skill, and start absorbing everything that they contribute, and then start contributing back to them. Give, give, give, give, give. And through the course of that, you’ll start to understand, hopefully quickly, what that market thinks of itself, how it acts, how it behaves, and then, therefore, you will become perceived in a certain way if you have the confidence to go forth and do that.
I know when I did coach training many years ago, it took me a while to figure out there is a difference between being a very good coach and the business of coaching. And as such, it sounds like what you’re talking about isn’t just simply expertise building, which is a big part of this, but it’s understanding the business that you’re going to be the SME for, the subject-matter expert for; what it takes to be there; building relationships with experts so that they learn to know, like, trust, and respect you as well, which takes time, of course. This is not a, “I sent one email to someone and suddenly the doors open up.” This is part of a lifetime, right?
I couldn’t agree more, and I love, you know, the Venn diagram that you talk about; I use it, too. You need to be known, liked, and trusted. And trust is the operating system for every successful relationship. And if you just don’t get, you can’t behave transactionally. The most successful person I know in the commercial real estate industry told me that his secret was is that he just followed up more than everybody else did. And that was just a pure grit, work, and effort thing.
So, yes, with that mindset that you’re now willing to learn, you’re developing a business acumen that helps you understand why people do what they do, how they do it, how to measure it, and what creates those behaviors. And then what industry, sector, or and then, what industry, sector, or domain acumen do you need to be able to demonstrate that you understand who the players are, what the language is, what the culture is, and how to operate within it? That’s number three.

Number four is functional acumen. How well do you actually know the job that you are hired to do? That could be software development, it could be sales, marketing, finance, accounting, HR, customer success, design—whatever that specific functional role is. And how do you continuously keep those functional skills modern and relevant as the tools and technologies in that function evolve?

Because in the innovation economy, tools change rapidly. If you were doing digital marketing five years ago, the tool stack and methods you used are substantially different than what is required today. The same applies to engineering, operations, or data analytics. You have to continuously refine your functional capabilities so you aren’t operating with an obsolete toolkit.

And number five is emotional intelligence and collaboration—human acumen. The machines are taking over repetitive calculation, automation, and routine tasks. What they cannot do is empathize, build deep relationships, negotiate complex interpersonal dynamics, lead with moral clarity, inspire teams, and collaborate across diverse backgrounds to solve novel problems.

Your ability to listen, communicate clearly, manage your own emotions, read the room, understand what drives another human being, and work productively in cross-functional teams is what makes you irreplaceable. As automation handles more of the baseline work, your value shifts entirely to how effectively you interact with and leverage the humans around you.

So those are the five pillars: growth mindset, business acumen, market/domain acumen, functional acumen, and human/emotional acumen. When you develop all five of those and view them as interconnected rather than isolated checkmarks, you become completely adaptable to whatever economic reset or technological disruption comes down the line.

And so what I say to that is that this is a great equalizer. It’s a great equalizer because anyone who has the discipline and the willingness to learn can go out and do this. You don’t need a fancy degree. You don’t need to have gone to an Ivy League school. You don’t need to have worked at a FAANG company. You just need to have the intellectual curiosity and the discipline to go out, study a market, understand a problem, and demonstrate that you can help solve it.

And the beautiful thing about the internet and the tools we have today is that the information is all there. It’s freely available. The people are accessible. You can reach out to founders, to executives, to hiring managers directly on LinkedIn, on Twitter, through email. You don’t have to wait for someone to give you permission. You don’t have to wait for an algorithm or an ATS system to review your resume and spit out a rejection email two months later.

You take control of the narrative. You show up having done the work. You say, “Here is what I’ve learned about your company. Here’s where I see the market going. Here are two or three challenges I suspect you’re facing based on what your competitors are doing, and here are a couple of thoughts on how I might be able to help you address them.”

Who doesn’t want to talk to that person? Every executive in the world wants to have that conversation. Even if your analysis isn’t 100% correct, the fact that you took the initiative, that you applied critical thinking, that you demonstrated business acumen, separates you from 99% of the people who are just clicking “apply” on job boards.

That’s the difference between being a passive applicant and being an active problem solver. In the innovation economy, companies don’t hire people to fill seats and follow rigid SOPs. Those seats are being automated. They hire people who can navigate ambiguity, who can learn quickly, and who can create value.

Sean, this has been pure gold. Where can people learn more about you, about GrowthX, and what you’re doing?

Thanks, Jeff. People can find me on LinkedIn—Sean Sheppard—or visit GrowthX.com. We’re constantly putting out content, working with founders, working with individuals looking to transition their careers and thrive in this innovation economy.

Sean, thank you so much for joining me today. And for those watching or listening, remember, take ownership of your career, develop these skills, and don’t wait for things to go back to the way they were. They aren’t going back. Adapt, learn, and move forward. Have a great day, everyone.

Pay Me What I’m Worth: Practical Tactics for Negotiating New Job Offers

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the producer and former host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with more than 3200 episodes.

Are you interested in 1:1 coaching, interview coaching, advice about networking more effectively, how to negotiate your offer or leadership coaching? Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us

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