Of Collaboration, Innovation And Hockey

Came across an interesting factoid by way of Daniel Pink's blog:

“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.”

A powerful argument for improving collaboration across organizational silos (an activity that's getting easier every day) -- as are the arguments for resourcing it.

Consider the results of a sociological study conducted in the supply chain group at Raytheon (from the Spigit blog):

"Employees who do not access the knowledge, perspectives and ideas of others generated lower quality ideas. Their network constraint consistently hurt them in the idea evaluations. But more importantly, look at the quality of scores for those employees with better collaborative networks. Being well-connected to colleagues across the organization resulted in generating high quality ideas. . .Creation of work-based communities has many benefits in terms of raising organizational IQ. It turns out collaborative networks play an important role in improving innovation of companies' innovation as well."


By the way, Pink got this factoid by way of a book entitled See New Now by Jim Ericson and Jerry De Jaager. Here's another interesting quote:

Signature Move: A hockey Hall-of-Famer tells rising stars, “The way to get the scouts to remember you is to develop a signature move – something you do so well that whenever your name is mentioned, everyone will have a picture of you in their mind.”

Brings to mind several hockey players I've known whose "signature move" was a nasty crosscheck, but still -- an interesting, and sticky, image to take away.