Recipe for Scientific Innovation

In the May 12, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell published an article entitled “In the Air” in the section “Annals of Innovation”. It is a very interesting article and I’d recommend it to you. The full article can be found at:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?

The article reviews elements of scientific innovation, primarily in three areas:

1. Sometimes we are just not looking hard enough. He gives the example of finding dinosaur bones, and a particular enthusiastic (well-heeled) who found that it wasn’t just that the bones were rare to find, but that there were not enough people looking for them in a systematic way. With the people and the appropriate search methodology there was a significant increase in the discovery of bones.

2. Sometimes the time is just right – and there are actually simultaneous insights of the same thing. He documents the elements around the discovery of the telephone and calculus, by more that one person at the same time. From these examples Gladwell concludes that “scientific discoveries, must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.” This is where he cites that artistic genius varies. “A work of artistic genius is singular.”

3. Sometimes it just needs a perspective from a different discipline – an interdisciplinary approach; getting out of one’s own silo. He cites an example of some physicians, a physicist and some others considering the following: “someone has a tumor, and the tumor becomes metastatic, and it sheds metastatic cancer cells. How long do those circulate in the bloodstream before they land?” The physicians did not know. Their field encourages qualitative observation and interpretation. “But physicists measure things and compare measurements, and do math to put measurements in context. So the physicist had the advantage of someone looking at a familiar fact with a fresh perspective.” With the calculations done they came up with a cancer-filter idea, and as it turned out there was already a company in another part of the U.S.A. developing such a filter.

Gladwell acknowledges that inventors put in years of preparation before the moment of a great discovery. However “it was impossible to know what unconscious associations triggered his great insight. Invention has its own algorithm: genius, obsession, serendipity, and epiphany in some unknowable combination.” But he cites too that in someone using the first element noted above to the extreme, they too can make discoveries. So he concludes that “maybe the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for invention – genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany – wasn’t necessary at all.” Interesting that he doesn’t resolve these two opposing theses.

Gladwell also ties in these elements to some work being done by Nathan Myhrvold with a new venture capital firm in the U.S.A. He has raised a lot of money, hired the brightest of people and engaged them in the magical process of making insights. Appears that with the above three elements they are making some very interesting progress – regrettably not publicly traded.