An interesting profile in today's NYT of John Kao, a renaissance man of sorts who now focuses his thinking and working of issues of innovation and entrepreneurship.  One thing that caught my eye was how moving between two cultures provided him with skills that would be relevant for his later professional life:

Dr. Kao, who is 57, was born in Chicago to parents who came from China
for graduate study at Northwestern. Growing up in Garden City, N.Y.,
“I’d wake up in a Confucian house and go to an American elementary
school and play baseball and go back to the Chinese house,” he
recalled. “I had to figure out how to balance two very different
cultural references.”    

Whatever Confucian influence there was seemed to cultivate his creativity.  That doesn't surprise me, though it does push against a common critique of Confucianism as a conservative mind set that discourages change and innovation.   Indeed, Confucius himself seems to say as much when he describes his sense of himself:

The Master said: "Transmitting insight, but never creating insight, standing by my words and devoted to the ancients: perhaps I'm a little like that old sage, P'eng. (7.1)    

      Of course, he was creating insight, many sorts of insights.  Perhaps the most significant was his insistence that political leadership should be determined not by hereditary claim but by moral accomplishment. 

      Another thing I noticed about Mr. Kao was this:

“What I had learned about behavior and the cognitive realm was
incredibly relevant,” he said. Before long he had written dozens of the
kinds of case studies that are the basis of the school’s teaching and
had organized a course on entrepreneurship, creativity and
organizations.

Many of his cases were about failures —
individuals under pressure, partnerships unraveling, learning through
trial and error and so on. Today, Dr. Kao says failure’s relative lack
of stigma is “a unique aspect of U.S. culture” that does not exist even
in countries like Singapore or Finland, both clients and both, he said,
“relatively hip.”

“There’s a saying in Silicon Valley,” he said.
“If you haven’t gone bankrupt a couple of times you are not trying hard
enough. It’s part of our national advantage.”

     The emphasis on failure brought Mencius immediately to mind:

We change only when we make mistakes.  We realize what to do only when we work through worry and confusion.  And we gain people's trust and understanding only when our inner thoughts are revealed clearly in our faces and words.  When it has no lawful families or wise officials within and no enemy threats without, a nation will surely come to ruin.  Then its people will understand that through calamity and grief we flourish, and through peace and joy we perish. (12.15)

      Failure is key to self-improvement: maybe that is a notion of Confucian innovation that was transmitted to Mr. Kao.