I’ve written a few times recently about the importance of breaking free from the straitjacket of our increasingly specialized world, and adopting a more generalist approach to skills development.  One of the core benefits from this approach is that it allows us to be more innovative.

Innovation today is increasingly recombinative in nature.  This means that innovators are not necessarily inventing completely new things, but rather applying existing technologies in new ways.  This requires people to have a broad set of skills and experience so that they can apply ‘left field’ thinking on common problems.

New research from Harvard Business School provides a further reminder of the importance of a broad knowledge base when it comes to integrating new knowledge and formulating new ideas.

“Young scholars frequently like to study a lot of different things, but they are often encouraged to really focus,” the researchers say. “Otherwise, how are you going to get a job? How do you get tenure? How do you get promoted? You do that by becoming the world’s expert in a very narrow area.”

Driving innovation

The researchers looked specifically at the development of the Microsoft Kinect, which was released back in 2010 as an accessory to the Xbox gaming console.  The device was able to capture the motion of the whole body of players, and this rendered it far more advanced than rivals, such as the Nintendo Wii.

It quickly became clear that the technology had a wide range of other applications outside of gaming, and researchers began to develop their own software to extend its capabilities for a number of motion-sensor based research projects.

While many researchers jumped on the opportunity, however, this enthusiasm was far from universal.  The researchers set out to explore what set the early adopters apart from their peers, and trawled through the database of academic papers held by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Each paper in the database is coded according to the category the research covers, and the researchers also classified the specialism of the authors of each paper by examining their publishing history.  This not only provided their areas of expertise, but also how specialized they were in a specific area.  Last, but not least, they created a timeline of publications where the Kinect technology was used to determine who the early adopters were.

Creating impact

When the data was assessed, it emerged that the researchers with the most diverse publishing record were around three times as likely to have utilized the Kinect technology in the first four years of its release than those researchers with the most specialized research history.  Interestingly, their papers also appear to be of a higher quality too, with the research nearly four times as likely to appear in the top 10% of paper in terms of citations.

“We find that generalists end up doing things not only earlier, but end up having more impact than folks who are more specialized when they engage with the new knowledge,” the researchers explain.

The researchers argue that those with a more general expertise were able to do this because they had greater awareness of what’s going on outside of their core speciality, and were therefore able to assess the potential and jump right in when the opportunity arose.

Being more of a generalist

In Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility, Waqas Ahmed outlines six steps we can each take to unlock the various aspects of our skills and knowledge.

1. Understand yourself – The first step is to truly understand yourself, and through this to focus on areas where talent or capacity meets passion or desire, as it’s where these intersect that true success usually lies.
2. Unlock your curiosity – Many sociologists regard curiosity as something fundamental and inherent to the human condition.  When we dig into the essence of this curiosity, it’s a desire to bridge the gap between what we know and what we want to know.  It helps us to dispel ambiguity and uncertainty.
3. Nurture your various abilities – In both academic and professional life, it’s very easy to become pigeon holed, especially if we happen to excel at one particular thing.  This is especially so in the workplace, where our job title provides clear constraints on the way in which we contribute in the workplace.
4. Tap into your versatility and move between spheres of knowledge – In a world that is pushing us indelibly towards hyper-specialization, the value of versatility cannot be overestimated.  Indeed, this ability to tap into “elastic thinking” is what science writer Leonardo Mlodinow believes will be key to surviving in this period of such rapid and disruptive change.
5. Connect the dots – Steve Jobs famously described creativity as a simple matter of connecting things; a process whereby you see something in one field and apply it in another. In the innovation literature, it’s a process known as recombination, and it contributes to the majority of patents registered today. Alas, it’s something that Jobs felt most people actively avoided.
6. Unify various strands of knowledge to provide clarity and vision of the whole – The modern world is nothing if not complex and inter-connected, so it’s vital that you are able to understand context and how parts work together.  This awareness of systems thinking allows us to appreciate the connectedness, relationships and context of the information we consume.

Of course, our school systems have typically compartmentalized knowledge into clearly demarcated subject areas, but our modern world demands that we find a way to connect various subject areas.

For much of our adult lives, society has tried to bash out of us the curiosity and inquisitiveness that underpins such a generalized mindset, rendering us ill equipped for the demands of the modern world.  It’s something the Harvard team believe is crucial to success in the modern world, however, and so I’ll leave the last word with them.

“If you are trying to make incremental improvements on existing technologies, then specialists probably are the most well-suited for that,” Nagle says. “But, if there is at least some piece of the company that is aiming to have big breaks and invent new stuff, then having some generalists to bring new ideas into the organization and say, ‘Here’s a thing that’s going on in aeronautics that might be interesting to what you are doing in biotech,’ might be helpful. Of course, you’d still want plenty of specialists on the team to be able to execute on the new idea.”