Current studies in innovation are often siloed to specific disciplines, precluding a generalizable understanding useful to understanding the factors that promote and hinder individual motivation to innovate. This study integrates analysis of 30 interviews and 500 surveys of Canadian innovators from a variety of disciplines as a means of understanding the avenues that education could use to develop innovation talent. The results of this study point to the overstated role of rewards as drivers of developing innovation talent. These findings support the idea that programs that wish to support innovation for all learners should be guided by the primacy of decisions that build confidence and fulfill interest and perceived importance of the task at hand, as well as those mitigating the costs of innovating. The implementation of promotive and cost-mitigating strategies should be a high priority for educational efforts to stoke the development of innovation talent for learners in many contexts.