Innovative ideas are not just about adding another feature or an adjacent market. You are already furiously working on these sorts of developments. Where are your chances of creating a significant innovative breakthrough higher? It is not a specific country, region, city, or institution. With this in mind to stay ahead of your competition and break new ground, make it a priority to seek out the intersection of multiple fields, disciplines, and cultures. To begin with, it is a place you can create in your organizations, teams, and mind.
"You must go where these very changes are occurring— at the intersections of industries, cultures, fields and disciplines." ― Frans Johansson
With convergence all around us, how can we continuously innovate? Most creative ideas are just combinations of old ideas. By combining existing concepts, you can create amazing innovative ideas. In the final analysis, they are often far more potent than any incremental extension of what you are already working on. This kind of thinking leads you to someplace different.
Vault Your Competition
Stepping into the areas of intersection enables you to vault a competitor completely. You may open an entirely new market, fundamentally reimagine your brand, or transform your business model. In the realm of social and technological innovation, this means that collaboration with people from diverse backgrounds is the key to success.
"We used to write this down by saying, 'move fast and break things.' Moreover, the idea was unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough. I think there is probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something, not to make mistakes." — Mark Zuckerberg
Break out of your network
On the personal side, hanging out with people in your field is comfortable. Whether you are a doctor, financial analyst, engineer, or artist. However, it does not expose you to enough innovative ideas. Spend time with folks in other disciplines. Learn a new language, take dance classes, try your hand at a new sport, or attend meetups of blockchain developers or photographers. Do whatever it takes to get out of your comfort zone to put you at the intersection.
On the business side, your network is vital to pursue your career or to follow existing well-travelled paths. However, today you will be climbing the corporate lattice rather than the corporate ladder. Your existing network can be an obstacle when forging new paths. Innovation is all about finding those new paths. So, break away from your networks and build another one. Surround yourself with diverse cultures, upbringing, backgrounds, and ability.
Multipotentialities
A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. While it is a mouthful to say — other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, or a Renaissance person.
One element of my behavioural DNA — innovation — is off the charts. This trait reflects an ability to see connections that are not obvious to others. So, I now offer this superpower to executives, as strategic insights. Over my 25 years as a CEO in a variety of organizations, we implemented many breakthrough concepts. However, on the downside, my constant barrage of suggestions would stress team members, who were average or below in the behavioural competency, embraces change.
The superpowers multipotentialite include,
- Idea synthesis—combining two or more fields and generating something new at the intersection. Innovation occurs at these intersections. Moreover, multipotentialites, with many backgrounds, access a lot of these points of intersection more naturally.
- Rapid learning—when a multipotentialite develops an interest in something, they want to research everything they can find on the subject. They are serial beginners. So, they are less afraid of trying new things and stepping out of our comfort zones. What is more, many skills are transferable across disciplines, and they bring everything we have learned to every new area they pursue. So, they are rarely starting from nothing.
- Adaptability— able to transform into whatever they need to be in each situation.
Encourage multipotentialites to be themselves
As a society, we have a particular stake in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. We need to create roles to achieve breakthroughs. We have many complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now. Moreover, we want creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them.
No one is expert in all fields. Solving complex and wicked problems needs a community of diverse thinkers. It needs to include a multipotentialite to generate different thinking and see new connections and domain specialists to assess what is possible. With this connectivity, we can realize the wholeness. Only by understanding the wholeness of a thing, can you go beyond and use it with its real potential.
On Diversity Led Innovation – The Medici Effect
An Italian banking family, Medici Dynasty, came to power in the 14th century. The family supported artists that led to The Renaissance. Renaissance painters, sculptors, poets, philanthropists, scientists, philosophers, financiers, and architects, shaped historical eras of innovation.
“To develop a complete mind: Study the art of science; study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else” – Leonardo DaVinci
The Medici Effect is a term coined by Frans Johansson. It is a phenomenon of innovation that occurs at the intersection of multiple fields, disciplines, and cultures, by combining existing concepts to create excellent, innovative ideas. Johansson’s book — Medici Effect is used throughout various industries to describe innovation that happens when disciplines and ideas intersect.
“Cultural diversity does not only imply geographically separated cultures. It can also include ethnic, class, professional, or organizational cultures. The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious, thinking in that person. Such a person is more prone to question traditions, rules, and boundaries—and to search for answers where others may not think to.” ― Frans Johansson
If you want to learn more, please read 7 Things You May Not Know About the Medicis, or watch the Netflix series — Medici.
Paving the way for scientific breakthroughs
About 20 years ago, Bob Reiter saw firsthand how outdated plant breeding converged with the newer science of molecular biology. The new structure was able to solve previously unmet challenges in agriculture. The collision of these two domains transformed the way the agricultural industry breeds plants and gave scientists the ability to bring improved seeds to farmers faster than ever.
“Breakthroughs in science often happen at the intersection of diverse scientific disciplines.” — Bob Reiter, Bayer
Bayer Crop Science created a new intersection. It pulled together capabilities in biology, breeding, chemistry, biologics, and data science. A team of 8,000 R&D-focused employees are collaborating both internally and externally to develop and deliver the next breakthrough agriculture innovations to help farmers – and the planet.
For example, consider weed control solutions. In the past, the industry developed herbicides and herbicide-resistant seed traits separately and sequentially. So, one company might spend ten years or more to produce a new herbicide product.
In the previous development cycle, once a product was completed, a second organization may start developing a new herbicide-tolerant trait. However, it took another 10 to 12 years to breed it into a compatible commercial seed variety. The farmers could wait a third or even half of their career expecting the release of a new crop protection product.
Bayer nows develop both herbicide and the complementary herbicide-tolerant trait products simultaneously, dramatically reducing development time. This coordinated research and development bring better, more sustainable products to farmers’ fields faster than ever before.
As someone who is passionate about using technology and science to improve the lives of everyone, industry and academia need to create these intersections.
Data Engineer — Perfect Combination of Data Analyst & Data Scientist
Big data technology continues to accelerate. As these technologies evolve and they get more complicated and granular. Moreover, new skills are needed to make use of it. As organizations adopt more of these technologies, to get more value out of them, they must continue to invest and build new skill sets.
An article by Jyoti Nigania sets out the data engineer, a comparatively new position, is a hybrid of a data analyst and a data scientist. The data engineer works at the intersection of data analyst and data scientists.
Engineering is at the core of a data engineer's job, as the title suggests. Data engineers shine at manipulating and moving vast quantities of data. Their role is to guarantee the complete huge data code stack will scale to support large workloads. Being able to find relevant information is a critical skill that data engineers have. Whereas data scientists standardize and refine machine learning models and alternative kinds of analysis.
"A data engineer is the all-purpose everyman of a big data analytics operation, working between downstream analysts on the one hand, and upstream data scientists on the other. They will often come from programming backgrounds and are experts in big data frameworks, such as Hadoop. They're called on to ensure that data pipelines are scalable, repeatable, and secure, and can serve multiple constituents in the enterprise."— Sean Kandel, Trifecta
A significant shortage of data engineers
Based on an analysis of LinkedIn profiles, Stitch and Galvanize say that there are 6,500 self-reported data engineers in the US. However, in Silicon Valley alone there are more than 6,600 job openings for data engineers.
"There's a huge demand on each side. For those that are simply getting down to dabble their toes into understanding they seem to be a computer code company and a data company, they could not be as refined with wherever they are going. They are graduating from totally different business intelligence tools. But people who have gotten any on the maturity curve, that's where we tend to see the very best demand for data engineer. We've taken our program, and rather than creating it client facing, we've self-addressed the enterprise and serving to existing data analyst and data human becoming data engineers." — Jim Deters, Galvanize
What is fascinating that is that most data engineers do not label themselves as "data engineers.” The most typical titles for folk doing data engineering are software system engineers, consultant, business analyst, data designer, and data analyst.
While job openings for data engineers pay within the low six-digits, top data engineers at Silicon Valley corporations have salaries of up to $500,000. This is an area where high-performers standout and are compensated accordingly.
Concluding Thoughts
"We live in a society where technology is a very important force in business, in our daily lives. And all technology starts as a spark in someone's brain. An idea of something that did not exist before, that once they have invented it —brought it into existence — could change everything. And that activity is generally one that's not very well supported." — Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures
Innovation starts with a state of mind. Innovation, combining existing concepts to create amazing innovative ideas, will continue to occur at the intersection of multiple fields, disciplines, and cultures. There are two key ingredients: mindset and ecosystem.
- Mindset — The mindset needed is at the intersection of a growth mindset and a dark-horse mindset. You must be aware of your superpowers, be proactive in exploring opportunities, developing strategies to capitalize on (or reject) the opportunity, and pick a direction rather than a destination, as you may find a better place along the way.
- Ecosystem — Create an ecosystem that embraces a diversity of thought, and lets people invest their career capital in creating breakthrough innovation and new strategic insights.
Remember that most innovative ideas are just combinations of old ideas. In the realm of innovation today, this means that collaboration with people from divergent backgrounds is the key to success. Get ready to step into the intersection, where anything is possible. The time is now.
