Written By: This post written by entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain. He is the founder of World Innovation Institute, Moon Express, iNome and Infospace. Naveen is a trustee of Singularity University and X Prize foundation. Follow Naveen Jain on Twitter: @Naveen_Jain_CEO
Naveen Jain - Trustee at Singularity University
Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to become expert at something, whether it’s playing the guitar, charting the stars or writing software code. In his landmark book Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell looks at why certain people are successful and postulates that, among other things, a combination of circumstances and the ability to become expert at something produces truly exceptional people and ideas.
That’s an interesting thesis on the part of Gladwell, and perhaps true in yesteryear, but in today’s world of growing exponential technologies, I beg to differ.
I believe that people who will come up with creative solutions to solve the world’s biggest problems — ecological devastation, global warming, the global debt crisis and distribution of dwindling natural resources, to name a few — will NOT be experts in their fields. The real disruptors will be those individuals who are not steeped in one industry of choice, with those coveted 10,000 hours of experience, but instead, individuals who approach challenges with a clean lens, bringing together diverse experiences, knowledge and opportunities.
And while experts will have a part to play in solving today’s looming crises where incremental evolution is needed, I believe that non-expert individuals will drive disruptive innovation. Here’s why.
Myopic Thinking
Sure – there will always be a need for experts, who will continue to drive steady incremental advancements in fields such as biotechnology, environmental sciences, or information technology. But I believe that the best ideas come from those not immersed in the details of a particular field. Experts, far too often, engage in a kind of myopic thinking. Those who are down in the weeds are likely to miss the big picture. To my mind, an expert is in danger of becoming a robot, toiling ceaselessly toward a goal but not always seeing how to connect the dots.
The human brain, or more specifically the neo-cortex, is designed to recognize patterns and draw conclusions from them. Experts are able to identify such patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because non-experts lack that base of knowledge, they are forced to rely more on their brain’s ability for abstraction, rather than specificity. This abstraction—the ability to take away or remove characteristics from something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics—is what presents an opportunity for creative solutions.
Innovation and Information in Abundance
I also believe that the value of expertise is diminished in a world dominated by two trends: the accelerating pace of innovation and the ubiquity of information. Today, technology moves at such a rapid pace that it is nearly impossible to keep up. With technological advances occurring at breakneck speed, expertise is obsolete within five to ten years. Think of all the industries turned on their heads by Internet disintermediation, whether it was book and magazine publishing, the printing industry, the recording industry or retail sales, to name a few. MySpace rose and fell from grace as the world’s leading social network in less than five years and pundits already question whether the era of Facebook, with its more than 900 million active users, is over.
The digital revolution has also meant a revolution in access to information. This puts more power and knowledge into the hands of non-experts. Open-source encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and search engines such as Google and Bing, which people can tap into anytime and anywhere via computers and smart phones, put a world of knowledge at our fingertips at a lower cost than ever before. Granted, they alone don’t make us experts – but they give us access to information in abundance, giving us a greater base from which to “think big.”
Some of the most inspiring and innovative minds I know are such disruptors. Take Elon Musk, a fellow trustee at the X-PRIZE Foundation. The South African-born engineer and entrepreneur has never hesitated to venture into new waters where he had no industry expertise but felt he could make a difference. The former founder of PayPal, is now CEO and CTO of SpaceX, a private company sending cost-effective space launch vehicles and rockets into space, and is co-founder and head of product design at Tesla Motors, where he led development of the electric vehicle Tesla Roadster.
The goal must be to expand ourselves beyond one field of focus and use our improved access to information to solve the very real and extreme economic, environmental and resource challenges we face as an interconnected, global society. I believe the time is now, before our looming crises bring us to the brink of destruction, to embolden those disruptive individuals to help innovate our way out of the significant challenges our planet faces today.
What do you think?
![Triclosan, the antibacterial and antifungal agent in liquid soap and a great many other things may disrupt hormone regulation and contribute to antibiotics resistance in germs. [Source: Wikipedia]](http://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/soapA.jpg)
![Smarter Objects combines the intuitive ease of using real objects with the flexibility of virtual ones. [Source: Virtual Labs via Vimeo]](http://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/smarter.jpg)
![Triclosan, the antibacterial and antifungal agent in liquid soap and a great many other things may disrupt hormone regulation and contribute to antibiotics resistance in germs. [Source: Wikipedia]](http://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/soapA-150x150.jpg)
![[Source: Wikipedia]](http://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/trash-150x150.jpg)
You’re correct as far as the direction & pace of things, but I think that the goal needs to go further than merely facilitating disruptive individuals. Many people believe that inventors and artists are born rather than created, but I would contend that many people generating wealth and value today are only doing so as a result of their experiences.
I agree that “people who will come up with creative solutions will NOT be experts in their fields.” However, it does not follow that “the real disruptors will be those individuals who are not steeped in one industry of choice.” The problem is that coming up with a creative solution doesn’t make you a disruptor. First, you have to be taken seriously – and only experts are taken seriously.
For instance, in medical research, there are many opportunities for people who understand both a biological problem, and its representation as a computational abstraction, to improve how we approach that problem. But these people are bioinformaticians, not biologists; and so they will never win a grant from the NIH to study a biological problem.
For another example, studies in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and Bayesian statistics have answered many old problems in philosophy; yet philosophers continue to struggle with these problems, because people who study AI or statistics don’t know how to throw together enough references to Wittgenstein and Frege to get a paper published in a major philosophical journal.
“First, you have to be taken seriously – and only experts are taken seriously.”
I disagree. This may have been been true in the past but such a requirement is diminishing as the obstacles fall to executing an idea.
It used to be that only experts were taken seriously because the risk of financing such ventures was concentrated into the hands of relatively few, and being an expert in a given field seemed the surest way to success.
With the rise of crowdfunding and resources like kickstarter, the risk is spread so widely that people can be less risk adverse and fund projects on other merits than raw expertise: attitude, associations/team, prior unrelated experience, etc.
Another consideration is the internet’s effect on expertise: the rise of the google powered superman who can access practically all relevant information to a subject, and if that’s not enough, the immediate ability to locate the necessary expert nearby.
The sentiment that “specialization is for insects” will only grow in time, as we edge closer to anyone doing anything, anywhere.
I consider myself one of those non-expert disruptive innovators you\’re talking about here, and I agree with most of this post. However, the idea that I should be spending my time thinking about the \”problem\” of global warming is rather insulting.
Agree! But, often, the bunch of experts builds a solid wall against the barbarians.
This is the true factor blocking new ideas.
And when a lucky barbarian crosses the gate, he must fight a deadly virus: NIH (Not Invented Here)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
This might be the original Outlier quote-
Thank you for an interesting article that touch on a very important subject – how to be “innovative” and creative. The concept of “Disruptive innovation” is turning into a concrete desire and is of course a double edged sword. It can really come up with some new ways – not always critically novel, but applied in an out-of-context that can sometimes spark some genius solutions. But it can also disrupt in an unconstructive manner and the examples that we like to use is of course seldom the bad ones.
But having said that, I too am I great fan of the disruptive innovation, meaning out-of-cojntext and inter-disciplinary approaches. Looking for an end solution that isn’t bound by traditions and taught restrictions is by far an easy task.
An old classic example is Christopher Columbus and the egg (I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out the details this time. A newer one is a story about Jeff and Tom and a paper airplane competition where Tom is the traditionalist and Jeff the disruptive innovator. Tom continuously doubt Jeff, but in the end he pulls it off and makes the “the best paper plane” – in this competition simply measured by how far he could make the sheet of paper “fly” – a scrunched paper ball! Totally outside the self-imposed rules, but solving the problem elegantly.
But in a more complex world the end-result might not be as easily measured and a single disruptive act might not save the day. To really drive the creative new thinking to solve issue in an unorthodox manner we need a combination of traditionally focused specialists as well as the disruptive innovators. The latter are need to poke and prod the established ways of thinking and thereby inducing a new solution. I would not say that disruptive innovation itself will come up with that many solutions to great problems, but they will be fundamentally important to allow specialists to unleash the competences in a different manner.
I would put my money on a team with specialist working together with disruptors. My problem is that the specialists are “easy” to find but get hold of the productive disruptors and make the two kinds work together is the tough one.
/N
The problem is not finding interdisciplinary people, but providing a power structure that both allows you to identify productive workers, and allows interdisciplinary workers to contribute.
Interdisciplinary workers have no great reputation in any field, so making one a principal investigator or project lead is rolling the dice. With a specialist, you can have a better idea how reliable they are.
However, if you pick your grants or projects according to the reputations of the specialists on the team (which is what all funding agencies and most venture capitalists do), grantees will realize this, and the specialists will only work on teams where they have all the power. Specialists see their specialty as the important one, and other disciplines as things that come in afterwards, to support them. This problem is endemic in computer science: Computer scientists often see better ways of designing a project, but are rarely allowed to contribute creatively, because they are always working on someone else’s grant. I have worked on projects for artists, linguists, and biologists where I put in overtime to change the design to something that worked better, and every time, the project lead made me take it out because they didn’t understand how it worked. To paraphrase the linguist: “Understanding natural language is a linguistics problem, and it should be solved by linguists, not computer scientists.”
I have been a creative polymath all of my life.
I am not an expert in anything.
I am equally artistic and logical.
I have found it a curse and a joy. A joy in finding the solutions to the problems, a curse and struggle in getting acceptance.
I have designed, created and catalytically started journeys to many solutions. These include at one level security tape, fashion colours into household plastics, the creation of shell pot pourri. At another level the use of catastrophe theory in economics, one of the earliest papers on the use of behaviour/marketing and psychology in economics, the global trade model for UNCefact, the primary author of the UNCefact busines process catalogue, the concept for the electronic International Trade Document Set, the first commercially viable export finance product based on execution competence rather than assets, the vision paper on joined up government and the Single Window for a UK think tank adopted the UK government which has become a global phenomen (but still poorly executed).That is not even getting out of first gear.
Since the begiining of the year I have helped design and mentor a company producing a new set of illustrated books, and put them on to the path of success. I have been helping another company with the strategy and marketing of a product that automatically switches off electrical appliances after you leave the room. I recently spent a day designing the next generation of tools for a company that trains people in the art and science of negotiation, and came up with a set of ideas around negotiating and competing for value that will take the company and the practitioners to the next level of competence (based on some ideas thrown together as a result of my work with one of my mentors a decade ago on value chain management, but adding a behaviourial twist to the concept so that the art was included as well as the science.
Sitting in this computer I have the design for an interoperability engine, the Interoperability Service Utility that can run on any computer and create what we call the multi single window, the ability to view the world your way but still be interoperable with everybody. I have a Universal Process Architecture (developed out of a recursion problem in building the UNCefact business process catalogue) that is only 3 components and can be used to manange any proces or negotiation, and the biggest challenge of all that humanity might have been using a binary logic system for what is a quad value universe, which is supported by the finding of evolution, physics, chemistry and any other science may you choose to propose.
In all my life has felt like being an alien. Where often people look at you and ask, how the hell did he think of that, how did he see that, we had 20 world leading experts looking at it and nobody came even near. Mostly, I see fear and awe. It would be nice to see delight and happiness.
I continue to contribute as best I can. For 7 years since I had to close my business due to global warming destroying on a regular basis our markets I have struggled to find employment or people that even believe in your skills. In a world of specialist pegs there seems to be no place that I have yet found for an omnipeg to find a home and a place of belonging. One of my mentors said that I might be doomed to be a prophet of whom few would follow. However, I still live in hope………….
I leave you with one last set of thoughts. To this proposal there are four responses. You can accept what I have written, you can reject it, you can issue a counter-proposal or a mutation, or you can simply choose to ignore all of it. Everything else is just semantic or payload.
Consider the following thoughts. The halogen collider what are those small particles doing in that collider, they are hitting each other and bonding/accepting, they are hitting each other and bouncing off/rejecting, they are hiting each other and mutating/the counterproposal or the just going round ignoring each other.
Second is the universe complex or simple. The reality is that the building blocks have to be simple and finite and the outcomes are complex and infinite. Thus if we consider the problem for one moment would not the process architecture have to be very simple, bbut yet be able to reach all the outcomes in the universe. The proof by the way is that all the outcomes of game theory can be achieved within this container, and evolution too. So there it is a quad value universe, and the conventional wisdom of the last 5000 years is that it is a binary universe just yes and no.
I really wonder what it will take to get some of the tipping points of wisdom to be accepted. I feel often like it is like being in a wilderness and undervalued, I hope at some time I might be allowed to come out of that wilderness and be allowed to bring this omnipeg mind to tackle some of the major issues we confront and add the value. It would be sad to see my papers and ideas like those of Leonardo only understood 500 years after my lifetime in a museum. It seems that we have lost the art of patronage to encourage the unusual/the questioner/the non-conformist to reach for the unknown.
The worst of it is that maybe we will not even be here as mankind in 500 years.
Brian Leapman
PS This post seems very Nietszchean and despondent. However, I am not that way it is just that this area of my life brings in dark clouds. By the way I have a solution for how to treat mental and addictive illness too, using the analogy of the mind as muscle, and recognising a common pattern about how people have managed to get bettern from various mental and addiction problems. So I live most days with joy and happiness, and have to leave other boxes on the shelf to keep that sanity and balance.
I leave you with one last thought. I have been lucky enough to travel much of this wonderful world and many wonderful and intersting people, but the greatest journey of all is in your mind.
It’s disappointing the author has made such a basic yet egregious error of confounding “expert” with “innovation” thus trying to invalidate Gladwell. Let’s put it this way: if you want someone to beat Roger Federer at tennis (expert), it’s not going to be an “outsider” who has never played tennis. That’s the fallacy. However, if you want someone to design a new sport (disruptive innovation), perhaps an outsider would do better than asking Roger Federer.