Research In Progress: Charting Creativity
by Sebastian Stockman, IQSS May 7, 2007
What's an inventor?
In pop culture' he is often as not toiling away in his garage to come up with a time machine' or is resurrecting human flesh in an Eastern European castle.
Most real inventors present a somewhat less indelible image. They usually work in the labs or offices of a corporation or university.
Take Lee Fleming. This mild-mannered Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School has two patents to his name - for semi-conductors and digital circuitry he developed during his seven-year stint at HP Labs in California (bronzed copies of the patents hang on plaques in his corner office in Morgan Hall).
"I study invention, creativity," Fleming said the other day, and this is not surprising considering his background or the academic research field he entered 10 years ago.
Not only did Fleming formerly work as an inventor within a large corporation - Hewlett Packard - he worked with other inventors, and those inventors used information from outside the corporation in their research.
"Hewlett Packard did not invent or commercialize its printer breakthroughs alone," Fleming wrote in his December 2006 tenure statement.
Strangely, though, when Fleming looked at the academic work on creativity, it seemed to stick to the "lone genius" script.
"I began my research on this topic as a doctoral student because the models I studied bore little resemblance to my seven years of engineering work at Hewlett Packard," Fleming also wrote in that statement. "The psychological literature, for example, focused on the personality characteristics of extremely creative people, an unnecessarily narrow emphasis given that invention has become increasingly collaborative and that firms hire and manage people of all abilities."
So while everyone else was looking at what made diamonds in the rough - the Einsteins, Oppenheimers and other hidden gems - so brilliant, and trying to figure out how to replicate them, Fleming started looking at your run-of-the-mill brilliant people, the patent holders and their collaborators, and tried to figure out what made them successful.
"We have a database of all U.S. patents from 1960 through last week," Fleming said. "These databases became available 10 years ago. … We have the biggest database in the world on this."
What Fleming has done with this enormous database is to look at patent-holders on an individual and a regional basis.
"At the individual level you can look at careers," Fleming said. "On the regional level you get these fantastic pictures."
The pictures are indeed fantastic. The color-coded, different-sized spheres (which represent the age and importance of the patent-holder's patents), and their connecting, color-coded tubes look like the close-up of some aggressive virus - or maybe Tinkertoys gone bad.
While Fleming's results emphasize collaboration, they don't discount the lone genius model entirely.
"My contribution," Fleming wrote in his tenure statement. "Is to explain and demonstrate that lone inventors are less creative on average and yet are also more likely to come up with a breakthrough." In other words, most lone inventors - because of their isolation - come up with fewer inventions. However, the ones they do come up with are, on average, more likely to be breakthroughs that find wide acceptance.
It's harder, though, for an idea to get out when it comes from a solitary inventor than it when it comes from an inventor - or group of inventors - with connections to others.
This is where the colorful illustrations come in. What these pictures ultimately represent is a different way for managers to think about innovation.
"The managerial implications of this research are informed by unusually strong evidence, because I modeled entire careers and applied an instrumental variable for a collaborative structure," Fleming wrote in that tenure statement. "In consequence, it is possible to observe the same inventor in different collaborative situations while controlling for causality. (This approach is methodologically innovative in the social-psychology, networks, and creativity literatures.) Hence, any managerial implications apply to all inventors, and not only to particularly creative individuals (indeed, the research provides an explanation for why particular individuals appear to be so creative)."
Essentially, creative people do well when they're allowed to interact with other creative people - whether or not those other creative types are members of the same institution.
Fleming's paper, "Managing Creativity in Small Worlds" - co-authored with his grad student Matt Marx and published in the California Management Review - takes a close look at the question, for managers, of maintaining a delicate balance. This balance involves, on the one hand, allowing inventors to interact with as many different types of creative people from as many different sources as possible (which broadens the in-house inventor's own knowledge base, thereby fostering creativity), while on the other hand, keeping the inventor from developing any great, possibly commercial, ideas anywhere outside the firm.
In other words, the manager's instinct is to keep a tight grip on his creative types - make them sign non-competes and don't let them talk to anyone outside their own assigned "silos" - but this, Fleming argues, stifles creativity. However, if you let your creative types talk to everyone, you run the risk of their being wooed away from the firm - not to mention the fact that they could divulge proprietary information (after all, one has to give a little to get a little).