Daniel Pink notes an interesting statistic presented in the book See New Now:
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.
Think about that for a second. Only 1 in 5 game-changing innovations came from the minds of people that specialized in that particular field. If accurate (
and I haven’t read the book or seen the data since the links to the section aren’t working, so I am going on faith here), it points to the important role that polymaths play in innovation.
It also portends a further increase in the direction of innovation via polymaths given the way current technology has democratized creativity and production. If you look at the true impact of technology over the past few decades, it has been the lowering of the barriers to entry of independent entrepreneurs across numerous fields–”the rise of the amateur”, as many have noted. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rate of game-changing innovation initiated by outside innovators increases over time and clusters tightly from the 1980′s to the present.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Innovation, polymaths
Bill, thanks for mentioning (via Dan Pink) our book, See New Now. Not sure what you mean by the links not working, but I can make the same offer here that we made to Mr. Pink’s readers: they can see and download the whole part of the book from which that “factoid” is excerpted by going to http://www.seenewnow.com, clicking on the “Look Inside” icon, scrolling down to “The Louis Armstrong Effect,” and clicking on the image there. The pdf that opens there can be downloaded. To avoid anyone wasting his or her time, though, let me say that the 80-percent-from outside-factoid is just that: we mention it and provide a link to the amazon.com page of the book where that case is made, and that’s it; but there are some other examples there of the importance of outside perspectives for innovation (and we think it’s packaged in a kind of interesting way, using the story of Louis Armstrong and Charles Black) .
My best,
Jerry de Jaager
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