A few hundred years ago, it was considered a virtue to know a little bit about everything. They even had a word for it: “Renaissance man.” Now, with vast amounts of knowledge literally at our fingertips, generalists tend to be tarred with a different term: “Jack-of-all-trades, master of none.”
“Young scholars frequently like to study a lot of different things, but they are often encouraged to really focus,” says Frank Nagle, assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. “Otherwise, how are you going to get a job? How do you get tenure? How do you get promoted? You do that by becoming the world’s expert in a very narrow area.”
If anything, people in businesses tend to be even more hyper-focused than academics, Nagle says, siloing R&D workers in very narrow research areas that give them a competitive advantage. But what if all of that hyper-specialization is causing researchers to miss vital information outside of their fields that could lead to new breakthroughs?
“We find that generalists end up doing things not only earlier, but end up having more impact than folks who are more specialized when they engage with the new knowledge.”
In a study published in the Strategic Management Journal this past September, Nagle and fellow researcher Florenta Teodoridis, assistant professor of strategy at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, set out to find out. “We thought it would be interesting to see if there were potential benefits to not hyper-focusing and having a broader set of knowledge and experience,” Nagle says.
Who is the master now?
They discovered that when it comes to innovation, sometimes a Jack-of-all-trades is the master after all.
Nagle and Teodoridis explored the issue by looking at a particular game-changing technology, Microsoft Kinect, which transformed the field of motion-capture. Released as a gaming accessory for Microsoft’s Xbox in 2010, Kinect was leagues ahead of similar technologies such as Nintendo’s Wii and PlayStation Move, in that it could capture motion of the whole body, not just a handheld controller.
Scientific researchers soon realized the potential for the knowledge embedded in the technology in a whole range of applications, and quickly wrote their own software code to use it. “It took the cost of doing motion-sensing research from tens of thousands of dollars down to a few hundred,” Nagle says.
Not everyone leaped on the knowledge right away, however. Since the academic community hadn’t anticipated this development, some researchers were quicker to use it than others. In order to figure out who those researchers were, Nagle and Teodoridis used a database of academic papers created by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. (Often innovation research looks at patents; however, given the time it takes for research to be commercialized, academic papers provide a much quicker gauge for the adoption of new research technologies.)
The database helpfully codes each paper with one of 51 different research categories—including aerospace, imaging, and robotics. For each scientist, Nagle and Teodoridis were able to classify their degree of specialization by determining how many different fields they’d published in. Next, searching for the keyword “Kinect” they were able to determine which researchers were quickest to use the new motion-capture knowledge embodied in the Kinect.
Generalists created more impact
When they compared the two sets, they found that the top 25 percent most diversified researchers were 3.1 times more likely to use Kinect in their research within the first four years of its launch than those in the bottom 25 percent. What’s more, the papers they produced were also higher quality—3.8 times more likely to appear in the top 10 percent of papers cited by their peers.
“We find that generalists end up doing things not only earlier, but end up having more impact than folks who are more specialized when they engage with the new knowledge,” Nagle says.
The findings give credence to the idea that people with a broader range of interests may be more likely to be aware of developments outside of fields they have experience in, and thus quicker to jump on novel knowledge when it appears.
For academic researchers, the finding implies that perhaps hyper-specialization isn’t always the way to get ahead. “You see lots of universities encouraging cross-disciplinarity and breaking down the silos, but, unfortunately, there’s a lot of institutional inertia that makes it hard to actually to do that,” Nagle says. “This is one more piece of evidence that we should be encouraging that on a person level as well as a project level.”
In business, where innovating before competitors can be a key to success, including some generalists on a team can be even more important.
“If you are trying to make incremental improvements on existing technologies, then specialists probably are the most well-suited for that,” Nagle says. “But, if there is at least some piece of the company that is aiming to have big breaks and invent new stuff, then having some generalists to bring new ideas into the organization and say, ‘Here’s a thing that’s going on in aeronautics that might be interesting to what you are doing in biotech,’ might be helpful. Of course, you’d still want plenty of specialists on the team to be able to execute on the new idea.”
In other words, we may be a long way from the Renaissance, but when it comes to novel developments, there still might be some value in being a Renaissance man or woman.
“Having more diversified knowledge and being a Jack-of-all-trades actually allows you to master knowledge that is farther away from your expertise in ways that can be beneficial,” Nagle says. “That can have important impacts on the future of science, the future of ideas, and innovation for companies.”
About the Author
Michael Blanding is a writer based in Boston.
[Background image by: AndreyPopov]
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