Justine Musk’s blog discusses the Innocentive problem solving website started by Alpheus Bingham, a vice president at Eli Lilly. He asked the public to solve some of the company’s hardest scientific problems by offering a financial reward to anyone who proposed a solution.
When solvers “rated the problem as outside their own domain”, they were more likely to stumble upon solutions. They were “bridging knowledge fields” – taking ideas from one domain and introducing them into a different domain. They reframed problems, combined and recombined ideas, and opened up new lines of thinking.
Her message echoed my own experience. Pursue your passions outside the explicit area in which you “work”. Embrace your inner renegade. And don’t back down from throwing unusual ideas into the conversation. Have faith in your own unique perspective. You never know when creative people in your network will “run with it”.