Why Companies Desperately Need Generalists to Innovate
Field outsiders see structural similarities better

Shubin Dai, a specialist in bank data analysis is maybe one of the best model of the outsider.

Passionate about his data financial work, he also spends his time responding to the various challenges posed by Kaggle, a community of data scientists. Quite surprisingly, he enjoys working on various topics such as nature conservation and medicine where he has gained considerable knowledge. For example, in these fields, he has achieved to identify the human causes of deforestation in the Amazon, and he has become a leading expert in disease prediction.

Like Kaggle, these kinds of outsiders are more and more prospected by companies, as they respond perfectly to the issue of open innovation. They have increasingly been opposed to the field insiders that know deeply their stuff, but have been suspected of being blinded by the limits of their own expertise.

The outsider specific talents have been based on what researchers have conversely called the “outside view”. It consists in relying not on familiar experience or analogies but on more distant and deeper analogies. By adopting an open perspective, they can seek and find similar structures with their project and thus better judge as they compare it with examples from other horizons.

InnoCentive is an organization that has tried to promote an outsider-like vision of innovation. It has bet on open-mindedness by setting up crowdsourcing with communities of various specialists. Thus, biologists or chemistry specialists can work on issues as distant from their field than IT or network architecture issues. Yet, by providing diverse and open expertise, they find connections that the clients themselves haven’t found about.

This enables InnoCentive to have a 75% more chance of success in their clients’ projects, compared to the 20% of corporate and internal research projects.

The bottom line is that organizations need to rely more and more on collaborators who have remote expertise and are therefore more original and accurate on their issues.
['Jean-Marc Buchert']
['Management', 'Innovation', 'Productivity', 'Creativity', 'Jobs']