The Innovation Killer

title: The Innovation Killer
pub.: amacom | new york | 2006
pages: xx + 219 pages

---

excerpt from the book:

we face dilemma. when it comes to innovation, the same hard-won experience, best practices, and processes that are
the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it. said another way, the weight of what we know, especially what we collectively ‘‘know,’’ kills innovation. Yet in many fields what we must know in order to make even the most basic contribution is ever-increasing.

it is a paradox. the paradox of expertise. you can’t innovate with it. you can’t innovate without it.
why can knowledge and experience be so lethal to innovation?

because when we become expert, we often trade our ‘‘what if’’ flights of fancy for the grounded reality of ‘‘what is.’’ But insight and innovation require a certain lightness of mind. perhaps Wilbur and Orville Wright, two brothers with high-school educations who earned their living building bicycles, didn’t know enough to realize they were attempting the impossible when they first defied gravity in a powered aircraft on December 17, 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina. If they had been the recipients of more formal education, would they have had the attitude that Orville illustrates with this quote? ‘‘If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.’’

perhaps not. noted economist and Princeton professor emeritus, William J. Baumol, wrote a paper entitled ‘‘Education for Innovation,’’ outlining the negative impact formal education can have on innovative thinking capability because it so completely indoctrinates individuals in the expert thinking of a field. He notes that many breakthrough inventions are the work of individuals who have relatively low levels of formal training. Citing the Wright Brothers as well as other relatively under-formally-educated examples—such as Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs—Baumol introduces the hypothesis that education meant to help a student master a subject might be completely at odds with fostering innovation in that subject.

now contrast this caution against overeducation with the obvious fact that without increasing levels of knowledge there would be no progress. Professor Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University recalls Isaac Newton’s famous words of 1676, ‘‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’’ He then notes that ‘‘if one is to stand on the shoulders of giants, one must first climb up on their backs, and the greater the body of knowledge, the harder this climb becomes.’’ He asserts that over time the educational burden will continue to increase as would-be innovators strive to learn what their predecessors knew and then go beyond it. As one proof-point of this assertion he notes that the average age at which great inventors and Nobel Prize winners introduced their ‘‘great innovations’’ increased by six years during the last century.

this statistic isn’t difficult to believe. few would argue that modern aeronautics engineers need to know everything the Wright Brothers did plus the knowledge accumulated in over a century since then in order to contribute meaningfully to the development of new airplanes. Or, that the knowledge required to invent the wheel was minuscule compared to that required to build a Toyota Prius or a Mercedes Benz today. Or, even that business managers need to have a deeper understanding of organizational science, manufacturing techniques, and financial models than the business owners of earlier generations.

---

the book content:

[part 1] what’s weighing us down
chapter 1. our own worst enemy: how the burden of what we know limits what we can imagine
chapter 2. groupthink: the strongest force on earth: why sustained innovation is so darned hard: part 1
chapter 3. expertthink: groupthink on steroids: why sustained innovation is so darned hard: part 2

[part 2] zero-gravity thinkers
chapter 4. time travel to see the naked emperor: the benefit of psychological distance
chapter 5. just curious: the benefit of renaissance tendencies
chapter 6. smart about something else: the benefit of related expertise

[part 3] defying gravity
chapter 7. the collaborator: what does a zero-gravity thinker actually do?
chapter 8. when and where . . . when do you need a collaborator and where do you find one?
chapter 9. how to work with a zero-gravity thinker: eleven questions and answers
chapter 10. do-it-yourself weightless thinking: losing the weight of expertise on your own
chapter 11. the courage to go where no one has gone before: the role of the leader

---

u can buy this book in amazon.com: