Innovation vs trend following

A few weeks ago I came across an article on the web somewhere that suggested Albert Einstein would be unsuccessful in today’s culture, and conversely that today’s corporate culture cannot produce independent thinkers. When I went back to find the original article, I was unable to locate it, but I found a list of other material on similar topics, listed at the end of this article.

One of the most meaningful quotes I found in the materials I read was this one from Lee Smolin:

It’s true that most of the really original work is done by individual scientists, but young people feel pressure to work on topics that are popular because it will help their career.

Most of what I was reading was geared toward scientific discoveries. I found much of the insight from the scientific community to be directly applicable to life as an engineer, even an engineer in a field as shallow as product design.

We are all familiar with the concept of “design by committee” as a bad idea. Committees are good for setting goals or evaluating results, but not for design or innovation. All of the products that I have worked on where design elements were literally decided in large meetings in response to a pot pourri of requirements turned out to be projects I was not enthusiastic to be associated with.

A product should come from a single idea. It should be “cut from a single piece of cloth”. Everything should work together naturally. While I understand something as large as say an entire automobile or a building cannot be practically designed in detail by a single individual, the conceptual design still needs to have a single identity to tie it all together. A single mind needs to integrate the various ideas.

How does this tie in with Albert Einstein? Einstein wasn’t a product designer, and trying to make him into one I think just cheapens what he accomplished. He was an independent thinker. He couldn’t have achieved the revolutionary ideas if he were not fiercely independent. He often worked with and learned from others, but his best ideas were not typically collaborations.

The first attack on the corporate mantra of today I want to make is that innovation is collaborative. Innovation comes from individuals. As I mentioned earlier, the committee is maybe best used to critique or fine tune a really great idea, but the raw idea is always the product of an individual. I think corporate leaders want to believe that innovation is collaborative because they are charged with “leading” the team. Also, if individuals are really responsible for the best ideas, it becomes more difficult to anonymize the success. It is truly rare, and very much against most corporate policies to give individuals credit. It is always “the team”.

The corporate inclination to hire “team players” is an odd one to me. You do need “team players”, but you also need some rakish independents as well for the bold ideas. Why don’t they advertise for that kind of person? Or do companies that only hire team players always farm out the dirty work to unpredictable independent thinkers?

The careerism pointed out in the Lee Smolin quote at the top of this article is another idea that isn’t very compatible with either good engineering or science. Too often ideas are selected for political value rather than other more transcendent measures. In research, I think “curiosity” is (or “should” be) the most compelling motivator. The purity of an idea or a motive I think is communicated in the final result.

Engineering is really just the application of science to practical problems, so once the science is discovered, we apply it to real products in the industrial, commercial or consumer worlds. Scientists today are more likely to be part of a larger project with large funding from a source with a specific goal. I don’t think corporate America can do great science, because science should be objective, without apriori goals or assumptions. Government and universities are far too political or driven by specific agendas.

I think our younger generations are coming up with two handicaps that may make it more difficult for them to become great original thinkers: first the “easy button” mentality that says if you can think it, it can be done perfectly on a computer, and real life is exactly synonymous with computers. The second is the over-socialization bit. If Einstein had a television or a facebook account, he couldn’t have seen the world from the fresh perspective that was uniquely his.

So do you have to live on a ranch in Montana completely isolated from the rest of the world in order to be innovative? Maybe not, but I don’t think it would hurt. The rest of us are just introducing evolutionary random changes to existing ideas – following trends rather than innovating.

Even as objective engineers and scientists I think we have the duty to be somewhat idealistic in our professional pursuits. Purely commercial motives seem a little callow and short sighted.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Group-Thinking-and-Committees-VS-Individual-Creative-Genius-Problem-Solvers&id=602793

http://www.cspo.org/ourlibrary/perspectives/Sarewitz_December05.htm

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/no-new-einstein.pdf

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/peer-pressure-means-therell–be-no-more-einsteins-356535.html