Usually tales of great discovery begin with a flash of inspiration, like when Watson and Crick first imagined a double helix and then quickly realized that they had discovered the structure of DNA; or an accident, like when Alexander Fleming contaminated his bacteria culture and stumbled upon penicillin.
Yet those stories, while not apocryphal, are misleading. Watson and Crick had tried many possibilities before hitting on the double helix. As a soldier in World War I, Fleming was horrified by how many soldiers died of sepsis. He had been actively researching bacteria for years before he got lucky.
Inevitably, people who make great discoveries are looking for them. It’s just that they often happen to find them where they weren’t expected. Really hard problems don’t often succumb to linear solutions, but wait unnoticed off the beaten path. That’s why true breakthroughs are not found deep inside one field or another, but somewhere in the space in between.
Anatomy Of A Breakthrough
Voltaire is said to have insisted, “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms” and I think that’s especially important when it comes to innovation. The term has become so loaded that it’s hard to discuss it without first designating exactly what you mean.
In a general sense, innovation is simply how we find novel solutions to important problems, but that is somewhat ambiguous. As I explained in an article in Harvard Business Review, we encounter a wide range of problems and therefore must pursue varied strategies in order to solve them.
Some problems, like how to create more efficient cars or find evidence for the Higgs boson, are reasonably well defined and can be tackled within a particular field or industry. Others, however are bit more tricky and require the development of new paradigms in order to solve them.
That’s why true breakthroughs require us to synthesize across domains. Watson and Crick needed to apply concepts from physics, chemistry and biology in order to solve the DNA puzzle. Larry Page and Sergey Brin needed to learn how to cater to the needs of marketers in order to make Google a profitable business. Breakthrough innovation, more often than not, requires combination.
The Fusion Of Art And Science
Great innovators are not just smart, they are also curious. They are rarely purists or polemicists, but are courageous enough to venture outside their domain. Vannevar Bush, who created the post-war architecture for scientific funding that made America and innovation superpower, warned against excessive focus on purely scientific pursuits.
But it is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists on living in a modern monastic cell… One most unfortunate product is the type of engineer who does not realize that in order to apply the fruits of science for the benefit of mankind, he must not only grasp the principles of science, but must also know the needs and aspirations, the possibilities and frailties, of those he would serve.
Bush was no idle dreamer. Besides being a successful engineer (he created one of the first useful computers) and a powerful government bureaucrat, he was also a successful entrepreneur, co-founding Raytheon in 1922. Yet he strongly advised scientists and engineers to look beyond their chosen fields.
One could argue that Bush’s support for liberal arts was a personal, rather than a professional, opinion. However, many other eminent scientists and engineers found insights from the arts. Einstein credited the philosopher David Hume as an inspiration for relativity. Steve Jobs, quite famously, cited a calligraphy course as inspiration for the development of the Macintosh.
The reverse would also seem to be true. Picasso’s encounter with african art led to one of the most productive periods of his career. It’s hard to imagine that happening without the work of anthropologists If art is truth, where would it be without science?
As the legendary physicist (and amateur painter) Richard Feynman points out in this video, artists that deny science are missing much of the beauty that nature has to offer.
