An article on innovation in consumer goods, titled Big Box Thinking: Overcoming Barriers to Creativity in Manufacturing, addressed how the most effective ideas will often come from operators and mechanics. According to the article, first published in Design Management Review, people with the most intimate relation with the production line have the expertise to understand options and make recommendations.

Yet the case has recently been made that as our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to wane.

The basic argument goes like this: Once you know something exceptionally well, you become so set in your ways that it becomes hard to remember what it was like before you were the "expert." That's why many experts have a hard time explaining their field to someone outside their field.

Last year Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Venture, Nick Denton, the British blogger and Internet entrepreneur, and tech writer Clay Shirky, touched on this issue when they debated the optimal age to be an entrepreneur. Shirky concluded that inexperienced minds are better able to make connections and think creatively than more knowledgeable minds.

"Young people have an advantage that older people don't have and can't fake, and it isn't about vigor or hunger — it's a mental advantage," Shirky wrote. "The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don't know a lot of things."

"This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you've become an expert in a particular subject, it's hard to imagine not knowing what you do," noted a New York Times feature about a year ago. "When it's time to accomplish a task ... those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path."

The New York Times cites the 2006 book The Innovation Killer, in which author Cynthia Barton Rabe suggests introducing outsiders — those she calls zero-gravity thinkers — for a fresh perspective. Bringing in fresh eyes can foster new solutions to old problems and, Rabe proposes, will keep creativity and innovation on track.

"If there's one thing successful innovators have shown over the years, it's that great ideas come from unexpected places," a McKinsey Quarterly interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird earlier this year noted. "Who could have predicted that bicycle mechanics would develop the airplane or that the U.S. Department of Defense would give rise to a freewheeling communications platform like the Internet?"

On the other hand, the Fast Company Blog says "originality is overrated."

According to Fast Company Staff:

Engineers are often told in engineering schools that a good design typically consists of 45 percent duplication, 45 percent slight modification and 10 percent originality. Those who follow this principle benefit from the experience of their predecessors. Their designs tend to work. That is the way it should be. We think the 10 percent originality might be a little too high.

Designer and entrepreneur Eric Karjaluoto also advises against "outside-the-box" thinking, though he clarifies this way:

A large number of designers set themselves up for failure by trying to push the creative envelope. It's not that the notion is inherently wrong; it's just that it doesn't provide anything firm to rail against. Ingenuity as a designer is best tapped when we are asked to resolve some kind of challenge.

So where does that leave us in terms of fostering successful ideas: inside or outside of the box?

According to a paper published by Psychology Today, "it is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic."

"Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement," according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychology professor noted for his work in the study of creativity and psychological flow. "But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary," Csikszentmihalyi writes in the Psychology Today paper titled The Creative Personality.

In other words, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills to innovate. But if those people can't communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise.

Earlier

Are Goods Ideas Bad for Business?

Innovate Through the Downturn

They Shoot Good Ideas, Don't They?

Clever Ideas for Creative Thinking

Cultivate Corporate Creativity

6 Misconceptions about Creativity

Resources

Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike
by Janet Rae-Dupree
The New York Times, Dec. 30, 2007

Big Box Thinking: Overcoming Barriers to Creativity in Manufacturing
by Peter Clarke and Jeff George
Design Management Review, Spring 2005

The Age Question (continued)
by Fred Wilson
Musings of a VC in NYC blog, May 16, 2007

Is 30 Too Old to Start a Company?
by Nick Denton
Valleywag, May 15, 2007

The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth
by Clay Shirky
Corante blog, May 19, 2007

The Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It
by Cynthia Barton Rabe
AMACOM, July 17, 2006

Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird
by Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton and Allen P. Webb
The McKinsey Quarterly, April 2008

Innovation: Old Often Becomes New
by Fast Company Staff
Fast Company, Jan. 29, 2008

Six Suggestions That Can Make You a Better Designer
by Eric Karjaluoto
ideasonideas blog, March 11, 2008

The Creative Personality
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Psychology Today, Oct. 14, 2008