An innovator is one who does not know it cannot be done.

Mashelkar’s line frames innovation as a kind of productive ignorance: the innovator is not paralyzed by inherited assumptions about what is “impossible.” The point is less that innovators lack knowledge, and more that they resist treating conventional limits as final. By not internalizing prohibitions—technical, institutional, or cultural—they attempt paths others won’t, and sometimes discover that the supposed impossibility was merely a consensus or a constraint of past methods. The aphorism also hints at a tension: expertise can both enable and inhibit creativity, so innovation often requires a deliberate suspension of “can’t” narratives long enough to experiment.