Innovation: genius, practice, or luck?

What causes innovation—innate genius, practice, or luck? Three columnists in the general press touched on this issue last week. Although they don’t address innovation per se, we can gain some insights into innovation from their comments.

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, contends practice makes perfect. He begins by positing "certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents," certain romantics would claim,  "far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe."

Today we know better, Brooks claims, noting, "We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special."

What Mozart had, Brooks contends, was "the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills…The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not IQ, a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft."

Is practice, whether or not coupled with innate talent, enough? Not according to Robert H. Frank, the Cornell University economics professor, writing in the Huffington Post. He says, "There’s no question that hard work and talent make someone more likely to achieve economic success. But for every successful person who exhibits these qualities, there are hundreds of others who are just as talented and work just as hard, yet earn only modest incomes.”

Frank continues, “Even talent and the inclination to work hard are themselves heavily dependent on chance. In combination, genes and environment ultimately account for all important individual differences, which means that someone who was born talented and brought up to be hard-working was incredibly lucky to begin with."

In the field of engineering, given sufficient talent and—if Frank is right—luck, what might practice do for us? It might allow us to memorize many equations, procedures, and programming languages, for example. Is rote memorization helpful?

Not according to AC Grayling, writing in the Guardian: "It is a common presumption that if people know a lot, they must be intelligent. Anyone who can reel off capital cities or count to 10 in several languages…is counted a bright spark." But, he continues, "…there is no automatic connection between knowledge and intelligence. There are plenty of very bright people who do not know the world’s capitals and cannot count in other languages, because they have never had a chance to learn them…By the same token plenty of people know lots of facts without being creative, thoughtful, quick-witted, humorous, and perceptive—the marks of true intelligence. Sometimes an overload of facts is the mark of a dull and pedestrian mind, the antithesis of intelligence.”

How does any of this relate to innovation? Grayling doesn’t use the term, but for him innovation would seem to be synonymous with intelligence: "…intelligence is a matter of output, not scores in a test. Einstein was unsuccessful at school and no great shakes as a mathematician, but he was creative and insightful, and saw a whole new way of thinking about gravity and the structure of space-time. A vivid interest in things, and an active desire to understand more about them, is a major characteristic of intelligence. When this leads to great creativity and important discoveries, we call it genius."

Where does this leave us? I’m inclined to agree with Frank, but he provides no recipe for success. We can’t revise our genes or command luck to smile on us. All we can do is follow Brooks’ implied advice and practice. But one more suggestion can be inferred from Grayling: organizations wishing to foster innovation need to create an environment that fosters in its employees a vivid interest in and active desire to innovate. That’s not an easy task in this day of budget cuts and layoffs—which can distract even the most innovative engineers, wherever their innovative spark originates.