October 5th, 2009
Factoid of the day: Revenge of the nonspecialist
Yesterday afternoon, I was reading Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson’s smart new book, See New Now, and came across this stunner:
“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.”
Ben Knight on October 5, 2009
Yes, very fitting
thanks for sharing!
Trevor Stafford on October 6, 2009
This idea is very much in line with the lessons offered in “The Black Swan”. Like the turkey blissfully unaware of the axe (appropriate for Canadian Thanksgiving) we tend not to be able to think outside or beyond what we immediately understand, or expect to understand.
Food for thought. Great post.
John Zimmer on October 7, 2009
Thanks for the tip on the book. I see a parallel between the statistic cited and companies that allow their employees a certain percentage of their work time to explore and experiment with new ideas. Google gives its employees 20% of their time to work on whatever they want and it was from this 20% that ideas such as Gmail came. True, the field of innovation is the same, but the innovation came from outside traditional working hours.
Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson on October 7, 2009
Thank you for this kind mention of our book! We’ve made it possible for your readers here to download for free the part of our book where that innovation reference appears (the book consists of 24 “lenses” for seeing new now).
They can do that by going to our website, http://www.seenewnow.com, clicking where it says “Click to Look Inside,” and then scrolling down to the eighth lens, “The Louis Armstrong Effect,” and clicking on the image there. When the pdf opens, they can read it onscreen and save it to their computers. The file will be available for this free downloading until November 1.
Regards,
Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson
Mimi Garrity Denman on October 7, 2009
Unfortunately – the link appears to be broken.
Mimi Garrity Denman on October 7, 2009
Please delete the comma on the link
Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson on October 7, 2009
Mimi (and others?) — Clicking on our names in red at the top of this post, or the previous one, will take you to the See New Now website.
steve cunningham on October 11, 2009
Dan – I’m reading “The Misbehaviour of Markets” by Mandelbrot right now, and he redefining what we think we know about finance through his theory of fractal geometry. His flash of insight that lead to fractal geometry? Staring at a cauliflower, among other things.
Murugesh on October 12, 2009
Great Post. Very true…
Some examples,
Ernst Mach was working on Optics discovered the Mach Number in Fluid Mechanics/Acoustics.
Delaunay was working on Crystal lattice structures where his contribution lead to Delaunay triangulation of Grid generation in the field of Computational mechanics.
You never know where you end up.
Darin Schmidt on October 14, 2009
This concept also counters the idea that creativity requires a large backlog of discipline-specific knowledge. There are those who think creativity and innovation cannot be taught for that reason.
frank on October 17, 2009
I heard the A-bomb was invented by a swiss patent clerk.
And swiss cheeze was invented by richard feyneman.
and miracles were invented by an athiest.
Go figure.
Jim Pouliopoulos on October 26, 2009
Since most people work in jobs for which they have little or no passion, it’s not surprising that innovations come from elsewhere. The innovators are probably working in jobs for which they have little passion but they daydream about working in some other industry or some other type of job. The daydreaming and a sense of purpose lead the innovators to apply their creativity on problems they truly care about rather than problems they face in their day-to-day grind.