Future Here Now: Work across silos, win a prize. If you can. And they let you.

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This article focuses on something that I’ve noticed for years, but it’s good to see it documented. This article in The Conversation (always a worthwhile read) lays clear the difference between conventional advice about career success, and how differently that works out for successful innovators:

We looked at the careers of Nobel Prize winners, who are arguably among the most innovative people in the world. We found that they are unusually likely to be what we call “creative polymaths.” That is, they purposely integrate formal and informal expertise from widely varied disciplines to yield new and useful ideas and practices.

In fact, the testimony of science laureates who were students of previous laureates suggests that creative polymathy is a skill that can be learned….

Many of these laureates discover problems by looking at topics in new ways, or they solve them by transferring skills, techniques and materials from one field to another. They often use conceptual tools such as making an…