- Sam
- Feb 22
- 2 min read
In today's world, we are encouraged to specialize, specialize, specialize - high school students are encouraged to pick a career path in their teens, children train from a young age in sports with an eye toward being a professional player, and software engineers are expected to have a horde of related personal projects to demonstrate at job interviews.
The research, though, is clear: generalists are more successful innovators.
For a rigorous analysis of such a wild claim, I recommend David Epstein's book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. To (very) briefly summarize, innovation requires creativity with a heavy dose of analogical thinking, or translating knowledge from one area to another. Being able to make these connections requires a diversity of knowledge and experience that can only be gained from in-depth (and unrelated!) experience. Epstein shares a lot of really counter-intuitive results about relative successes between generalists and specialists in everything from sports, to the fine arts, to STEM.
At the least, I'd like to share a bit about a related study most familiar to those of us in STEM, one performed by psychologist Kevin Dunbar titled "How scientists think: on-line creativity and conceptual change in science." For this study, Dunbar spectated the weekly group meetings of four microbiology labs at a university and studied how these groups solved challenging problems. Overwhelmingly, all participants (students, postdocs, and professors alike) solved problems by applying analogies - relating the problem to experiments they had done prior, work they had heard of, or simple thought experiments using everyday items. "The more unusual the challenge, the more distant the analogies, moving away from surface similarities and toward deep structural similarities," Epstein notes about Dunbar's study.
The labs with scientists of more academically diverse backgrounds (chemistry, physics, biology, medicine) offered more frequent and more useful analogies, and these labs solved problems faster and more efficiently. As a spectator, Dunbar even got to see two labs combat the exact same experimental issue during his study, with the more diverse lab solving the issue much more rapidly.
When we solve problems, especially in innovative areas, we necessarily need to draw from unrelated experience because the thing we want to make doesn't exist yet. The more "unrelated" knowledge we have to draw from, the more agile we become as engineers, and the more creative we become as problem-solvers.
In general, I think there are two takeaways here:
Surround yourself with people of different backgrounds, no matter how unrelated their experience might be to the problem you're trying to solve.
Don't hesitate to not just dip your toes in other areas of study, but to jump right in!