Wanwei Steel discussed in the article "Depth vs. Breadth" the question of which type of talent is more creative. This article focuses on David Epstein’s book Scope: Why Generalists Win in a World of Specialization. The answer to this question is actually not that intuitive.
First, it introduces a survey by economists, which measures the value of a comic book by counting comic sales and film and television adaptations, and then evaluates the creative level of comic writers. I would like to ask which of the following factors are positively related to the value of comic works:
1. Whether the author is a prolific person and whether the speed of publishing books is fast.
2. What is the author’s experience and how many years has he accumulated in the comics industry.
3. Is the work completed by a single author or by a team.
Intuitively, we generally think that the longer we accumulate time in the comics industry and the more experience we have, the better we can create good works, but the result is that there is no correlation! The sooner a book is published, the less valuable it will be. The most critical factor is actually the breadth of the author's coverage. Researchers divided comics into more than 20 types. After research, they found that the more types an author dabbles in, the higher the value of a comic book. Broad-minded authors can be more creative than industrial creative teams.
Yesterday’s article already discussed that innovation is actually the connection of ideas. The more remote the connection, the more novel the innovation. If you can connect things that originally belong to different types and fields, it is an excellent innovation. I thought of Jackie Chan's combination of martial arts and comedy, which not only created a personal brand but also opened up a new ecosystem of action movies. Wu Jing's popularity is entirely due to the combination of action movies and military movies, which can be regarded as creating a new trend for action actors.
The above innovations belong to the category of literary and artistic works. So does this principle have wider applicability?
Researchers evaluate a person's innovation level by investigating the invention record of 3M Company's patents. The U.S. Patent Office divides all patents into 450 types. Patent applications by experts are highly concentrated in a certain type. And generalists have patents in many types. It was found that specialists and generalists had similar levels of patents. But they are not the most creative talents. The most creative person is called a "polymath", and his characteristic is that he has another core field of his own, and he has delved deeper in the core field, and his depth is between a specialist and a generalist. But generalists can also apply skills in core areas to adjacent areas. They continue to learn new things in this way, so that in the end the generalist's breadth can span dozens of patent types.
Therefore, the conclusion is that people with multiple specialties are the most creative group. The worst ones are those who are neither deep nor wide, and those in the middle are those who are either extremely deep or extremely wide.
This conclusion can also be supported by scientific research. The same set of experimental results, if you can organize, interpret, and package them into a self-consistent story from more cognitive perspectives, conceptual frameworks, or schema (yes, a good scientist must be A good storyteller), which means you have more entry points for innovation. On the contrary, if there is only a single cognitive framework in mind, once the experimental data cannot be directly applied, it is easy to get into trouble, let alone innovation. How can scientific research have more cognitive frameworks? Naturally, it is necessary to extensively explore multiple fields related to the direction of concentration. At the practical level, it is necessary to read more literature in related fields. This is actually not an easy task. After all, there are countless documents in any relatively mature field. But this is the basic quality of outstanding scientific researchers, and no skills or methods can replace this hard work.
This reminds me of a previous chat with Dan Yang. She talked about how she advanced a study.
First, a postdoc will start to explore several possible directions at the same time. After a period of time, based on the results and progress of each direction, it will be judged which direction is most likely to be achieved, and then determine that direction and abandon other directions. After determining a direction, then consider and rank possible packaging and storytelling methods based on the latest experimental results. Further arrange subsequent experiments based on the top-ranked storytelling method, and adjust the above order at any time based on new results until a complete and most innovative story is packaged. Just imagine, to do this, you need to have a considerable degree of knowledge in multiple fields and have a corresponding theoretical framework in your mind. This is the quality of a senior scientific researcher. It cannot be achieved overnight, it requires years of step-by-step accumulation. Therefore, the time of reading literature cannot be stopped for a day.