Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike, writes Janet Rae-Dupree in last Sunday's New York Times. Drawing on examples from Chip Heath and Cynthia Barton Rabe, the article looks at how innovation is actually aided by toning down the level of expertise.
This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path. ...
“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” [Rabe] says. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”
(Thanks, augustdiva!)