18-06-2013, 02:45 PM
The Medici Effect
The Medici Effect.pdf (Size: 707.87 KB / Downloads: 230)
Introduction
By the time you reach the docks in the harbor, you can tell that
this place is special. Bright, colorful paintings of sailboats and flags line
the piers—hundreds and hundreds of them, drawn by visiting captains
and crew members from every corner of the globe. Horta is the one
place between the Americas and Europe where world-traveling sailors
stop to take a break. Some are heading toward Fiji, others to Spain.
Some are on their second tour around the world; others are simply resting
before the last leg to Brazil. They come from different backgrounds
and cultures. And all of them converge upon the rustic-looking Peter’s
Café. Here they can pick up year-old letters from other world travelers
or just sit and talk over a beer or a glass of Madeira.
Creating the Medici Effect
The idea behind this book is simple: When you step into
an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine
existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas. The
name I have given this phenomenon, the Medici Effect, comes from a
remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy.
The Medicis were a banking family in Florence who funded creators
from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a
few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers,
painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence.
Surprising Insight
Mick Pearce, an architect with an interest in ecology, accepted
an intriguing challenge from Old Mutual, an insurance
and real estate conglomerate: Build an attractive, functioning office
building that uses no air conditioning. Oh, and do it in Harare, the capital
of Zimbabwe.1
This may, on the face of it, seem ridiculous. After all, it can get
pretty hot in Harare. But Pearce, born in Zimbabwe, schooled in South
Africa, and trained as an architect in London, was up for the challenge.
And he achieved it by basing his architectural designs on how termites
cool their towerlike mounds of mud and dirt. What’s the connection?
Termites must keep the internal temperature in their mounds at
a constant 87 degrees in order to grow an essential fungus. Not an
easy job since temperatures on the African plains can range from over
100 degrees during the day to below 40 at night.
The Intersection—
Your Best Chance to Innovate
University in Providence, Rhode Island, conducted a remarkable
experiment.1 The experiment went something like this: A
rhesus monkey is trained to play a computer game. The point of the
game is to use a yellow cursor to chase down a red dot that moves randomly
across the screen like an erratic hockey puck. The game looks
and feels like something designed for a child except for one noticeable
difference. The monkey doesn’t use a mouse or a joystick to play this
game. Rather, the monkey moves the cursor with its mind. It controls
where the cursor goes—mentally.2
When these results were published in the prestigious science journal
Nature, they became what was likely the most reported Brown University
science story ever.3 The day the press release circulated over the
wires, Mijail Serruya, the graduate student behind the experiments,
was flooded with calls from every corner of the globe.
Creative Ideas Are New
The team behind the experiments had accomplished something unique,
something no one had done before—clearly a key characteristic of a creative
idea. If you duplicate a painting by Monet you have not done something
creative, and if you set up a bookshop Web site that operates exactly
like Amazon.com, you have copied a business model, not innovated.
This criterion seems obvious, but it can be deceptive in its simplicity.
What if an idea is new to the creator, but not to others? Unfortunately,
it would be hard to consider such an idea innovative. Imagine,
for instance, if someone claimed to have discovered the double-helix
structure of DNA. No one would pay any attention. Watson and Crick
did that more than fifty years ago. But what if the situation is the reverse?
What if the idea is old to the creator, but new to others? The creator
could, for instance, tell an old story in a new rendition, or use a
screw cap in a new fashion (as Thomas Edison did when he and his
team developed the fixture for the light bulb). In such a case society
will agree that the product is indeed creative. In fact, most creative activity
happens in this way.
Innovative Ideas Are Realized
The reason we call the team’s experiment innovative is that they made
it happen, and others are now using the discoveries to further their own
research. Innovations must not only be valuable, they must also be put
to use by others in society. Simply imagining the most amazing invention
ever does not qualify one as an innovative person. If an idea exists
solely in someone’s head, it cannot yet be considered innovative. It has
to be “sold” to others in the world, whether those people are peers who
review scientific evidence, customers who buy new products, or readers
of articles or books.
Intersectional Ideas Will Make You Do a Double Take
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is well
known in his field. In 1976 he published The Selfish Gene, a book
that pushed evolutionary theory a big step forward. Dawkins suggested
that evolution did not occur between species or even between organisms,
but between genes—and that these genes were “selfish.” This
theory was a notable contribution to his field and earned Dawkins significant
acclaim.14
It is therefore rather curious to note that Dawkins’s arguably most
widespread contribution to society was a very different type of idea,
one that originated from a single, fairly off-topic chapter in his book. In
it Dawkins connected the field of genetic evolution with that of cultural
evolution—and made the connection explicit. He suggested that
ideas, which are the building blocks of our culture, evolve and propagate
just like genes.