Is becoming an expert counterproductive to becoming innovative

In the book "The Medici Effect" by Frans Johansson, about how the best applicable innovations arise from the intersection of disciplines, there is an anecdote about a guy with no medical background who creates a technique to discover cancer, as told by one venture capitalist cited by the author.

Paul Maeder is also a very well educated man. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton University, his master's in mechanical engineering at Stanford, and his MBA at Harvard Business School. With all of these degrees, you would think he places an extraordinarily high value on education. But only seconds into our conversation he started listing individuals and groups who have radically innovated because they did not have formal training... (50)

The idea that the lack of formal training is a good thing isn't far-fetched. Many great scientific innovators, people like Einstein, Edison, Franklin, and da Vinci, lacked formal education in the fields they excelled in. (I wonder if the same applies to innovation in the arts or other fields.)

"Take this guy Stan Lapidus," he told me one day. "He doesn't have an M.D. or a Ph.D., but he has come up with an amazing way of analyzing stool samples for colon cancer pathology. Put it in a blender, mix, and you can spot cancer with hardly any false positives. It's really an amazing invention. Now, why did he think of this? Because he's not a doc."

Mr. Johansson says the capitalist doens't think education is a bad idea. "But he clearly sees it as potentially limiting creativity."

Through school, mentors, and organizational cultures, education tends to focus on what a particular field has seen as valid. If, for instance, you wish to be a great medical doctor, there are rules that must be mastered. A good education will teach you these rules. You learn what past experts and thinkers concluded and use their experiences to build your own expertise. You do this to learn what works. Expertise in a particular field could suffer if too much time were spent questioning basic assumptions. The price for such an approach, however, is that one more easily becomes wedded to a particular way of doing things. As a result, associative barriers are erected, making intesectional ideas less likely.

Food for thought.