I’ve come to the conclusion that good ideas bubble up from unlikely places. It’s not that the likely places don’t have good ideas, but it seems to me that the visibility that comes from being a likely place doesn’t help. Too many things blocking the way. Especially if you challenge the status quo.
“If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting” – We’ve all heard that statement before. But if you think about it… it sums up part of the problem. Groups/organizations/corporations/governments all continue to do the same things… and continue to get the same results. Maybe it’s financially motivated, maybe it’s that an idea is “Not invented here!”, or maybe it’s all about control. Whatever the reason, someone looking at a problem from a different angle sometimes brings about the breakthrough needed to make a major positive change.
There is a phrase I like – take a multi-disciplinary approach. It means take ideas/people from diverse areas and throw them together. And seeing what happens…
A friend of mine was a researcher at a major university. He told me this story about a professor who worked in the field of audiology who did a sabatical with a group that studied vision. The professor introduced them to concepts that had never been applied to the field of vision. The amusing part for the professor was that the papers written on their collaborative efforts were cited more than any of the papers written in his own field of audiology. Not that his work in audiology wasn’t good. But he helped the vision group breakout in totally new directions.
So what can we do to bring in new ideas to the same problems we’ve been struggling with?
Flying Below the Radar 