Innovation: genius, practice, or luck?
Three columnists recently touched on this issue, and reached three different conclusions.
By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief -- EDN, June 25, 2009
David Brooks, writing in The New York Times, contends that practice makes perfect (Reference 1). He begins by positing “certain paragons of greatness—Dante, Mozart, Einstein—whose talents,” certain romantics would claim, “far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an otherworldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.” Today we know better, Brooks claims, noting, “In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special.” Mozart, according to Brooks, owed his talent to a father who made him practice.
Is practice, whether with or without innate talent, enough? Not according to Robert H Frank, a Cornell University economics professor, writing in the The Huffington Post (Reference 2). “There’s no question that hard work and talent make someone more likely to achieve economic success,” he writes. “But for every successful person … there are hundreds of others who are just as talented and work just as hard, yet earn only modest incomes.” He concludes, “Even talent and the inclination to work hard are themselves heavily dependent on chance.”
In engineering, given sufficient talent and—if Frank is right—luck, what might practice do for us? It might allow us to memorize equations and programming languages, for example. Is rote memorization helpful? Not according to AC Grayling, writing in The Guardian (Reference 3): “It is a common presumption that if people know a lot, they must be intelligent. Anyone who can reel off capital cities or count to 10 in several languages ... is counted a bright spark.” But, he continues, “There are plenty of very bright people who do not know the world’s capitals and cannot count in other languages, because they have never had a chance to learn them. ... By the same token plenty of people know lots of facts without being creative, thoughtful, quick-witted, humorous, and perceptive—the marks of true intelligence.”
How do these questions relate to innovation? Grayling doesn’t use the term, but for him innovation would seem to be synonymous with intelligence: “Intelligence is a matter of output, not scores in a test. Einstein was unsuccessful at school and no great shakes as a mathematician, but he was creative and insightful. ... A vivid interest in things, and an active desire to understand more about them, is a major characteristic of intelligence.”
Where does this writing leave us? I’m inclined to agree with Frank, but he provides no recipe for success. We can’t revise our genes or command luck to smile on us. All we can do is follow Brooks’ advice and practice. But we can infer one suggestion from Grayling: Organizations wishing to foster innovation must create an environment that fosters in its employees a vivid interest in and active desire to innovate. That’s not an easy task in this day of budget cuts and layoffs—which can distract even the most innovative engineers, wherever their innovative spark originates.
One way to learn to focus is to study how successful innovators operate. The stories of three of them appear in this special section. Jim Williams of Linear Technology warns of the dangers of the rigid setting of goals, which individuals might meet at the expense of companywide innovation. Chuck Grant of Cadence attributes his innovative career in part not to a narrow focus on one area but rather to the chance to gain experience in test, marketing, training, sales, and customer support. And when asked how he became an innovative engineer, Cadence’s Ken Wadland says simply, “I don’t follow rules.”
Read the profiles in this issue, and review our previous “EDN Innovators” profiles. Let us know what you think.
References
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Brooks, David, “Genius: The Modern View,” The New York Times, May 1, 2009.
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Frank, Robert H, “Success and Luck,” The Huffington Post, May 2, 2009.
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Grayling, AC, “Knowledge and genius,” The Guardian, May 1, 2009.
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your still a scumbag too
george thurrowgood - 2010-14-7 02:35:26 PDT -
As an inventor with 20 patents I may be able to comment aptly on innovation. Here are my findings:
1. Profitable innovation involves two opposing processes. One is the ability to perceive needs, events, or other phenomena from many different perspectives,both from a knowledge of the field and related fields. This typically includes reviewing "crazy" ways of doing something, with extreme mental divergence. The second is the ability to analyze "best choices" for avernues of solution. This involves extreme perseverance, tenacity and mental convergence.
2. Most education, information, culture, attitude preconditioning, inhibit this process. Our conformist society subtly suppresses "difference" and innovation is currently in recession.
3. Innovation takes time.We need 10-20 year government and corporate plans with high risk high reward policies. We are in a rut with 5 year "safe way to ruin" plans. The 5 year mobile career manager is part of the problem.
4. Only about 20% of first degree US students are in natural sciences or engineering. China students are running 50%. We think its smarter to study law instead of engineering. We need to push science and engineering as high prestige, highly rewarded pursuits.
5. IT is often confused with innovation and creativity. Information is good, but dots must be connected. As we have seen in intelligence, connecting dots is a bigger challenge than gathering data. Almost all failure is not due to lack of information, but lack of innovative imagination in visualizing probabilities, and tracking patterns of information which converge on probabilities. We need to rethink the way we are tuaght to think. Let's innovate our approaches to fostering innovation! Our future standard of living depends upon it.
Austen Barnes - 2009-29-6 14:01:00 PDT -
I think an interesting point that was glossed by most if not all of these articles were the importance of collaboration. Not direct collaboration because that isn't always practical or relevant. But Einstein, Mozart and every other genius had contemporaries (and quite smart ones at that) whom they were able to bounce ideas off of and refine their best work. The history books usually note it to some effect but I think they always miss the point that very little would have been discovered if that so called "genius" was locked in a cell by themselves.
Chris Gammell - 2009-29-6 12:09:00 PDT -
@Bloke: While Ogden Nash indeed has "A Beautiful Mind" Witness:
Reflections on Icebreaking: Candy is Dandy but Liquor is Quicker.
I believe you meant John Nash the troubled subject of the aforementioned movie.
Burt - 2009-29-6 07:56:00 PDT -
There is no prescription. Genius insight is a combination of skill, intuition and good marketing. Most are recognized through self-aggrandisement and have sufficient ego or force of will not to accept the wrong common thinking. Except for the occasional flash of genius, most are plain-vanilla or just kookey. Take Ogden NAsh ("A Beautiful Mind"), Alan Turing, Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, Benjamin Franklin, Steven Hawking, Tiger Woods. I have nothing in common with these people and would not care to pass time with them even at a boring party.
They are genuises because they get the time to become so, either through money or happenstance; an opportunity to excel. They disdain parties, drinking and whoring. Not my kind of people.
An Ordinary Bloke - 2009-28-6 18:44:00 PDT
