A short talk arguing that deep expertise often blocks breakthrough innovation because experts stop searching once a plausible solution appears. The speaker cites a study of 17,000 patents showing most patents are incremental and typically solved within the same discipline, whereas breakthrough solutions more often come from different disciplines or multidisciplinary teams. The piece recommends bringing in outsiders or cross-disciplinary collaborators to find breakthrough solutions.
Chapters
Have you ever lost your keys? You're looking for them everywhere. You have no idea where they are. So you start ripping your place apart, you start going through all the papers on your desk, you start fishing through the cracks in your sofa, you start going through your dirty laundry. And you find them after about 15 minutes, and inevitably, what do you say to yourself? You say to yourself, can you believe it? They were in the last place I looked. Well, of course, who finds something and keeps on looking for it? Well, guess what? The same is true with the brain. When the brain comes up with a solution quickly, it will stop looking. Expertise is the enemy of innovation. The more you know about a particular topic, the more difficult it is for you to develop breakthrough solutions. Expertise is the enemy of innovation. In fact, there was a study done, a fascinating study that looked at 17,000 patents, and in that, what they found was that most of those patents were derivatives of previous patents. They were adaptive innovation. And in most cases, the solution was found by somebody from the same discipline in which the problem was solved. So it was a biology problem. It would be a biologist who found the solution. If it was a chemistry problem, they find a chemistry. But it was those breakthrough solutions, not as often, not as common. But those breakthrough solutions in almost every situation were found by someone from a different discipline or from multidisciplinary teams. Expertise truly was the enemy of innovation. In this case, in order to find these breakthrough solutions, you typically needed to find somebody in a completely different space who could help you find a solution. We see this in many areas of life, many areas of business, and this is a really important point when it comes to innovation. One of the things that I always like to tell NASA is that if you have 100 aerospace engineers working on an aerospace engineering problem, adding the 101st aerospace engineer is probably not going to make that much of a difference. But if you add nanotechnologist, a biologist, someone from Hollywood, a musician, you never know where that breakthrough solution is going to come from. So the next time you're trying to find a solution and you're stuck, maybe you are the enemy of your solution. Maybe you need to look outside your organization or outside your area of expertise to find a solution.
