Is collaboration the key to innovation today?

"The Medici Effect," mentioned in my last entry, is about the fruits of collaboration. The author asserts that collaboration between seemingly unconnected disciplines is key to being truly innovative (i.e., coming with new ideas) today.

One anecdote he writes is about a team of Brown University scientists that created a way for a monkey to use not his hands but his brain to control a mouse cursor on a computer screen.

This story is especially compelling not just because of what the team of scientists discovered, but because it was the result of a deliberate effort to find an intersection of disciplines. The group... consisted of mathematicians, medical doctors, neuroscientists, and computer scientists...

This was no accident. Professor Leon Cooper, who pioneered the brain science research efforts at Brown University, made a special point of bringing together a wide range of disciplines to understand the human mind. (12)

This team was featured in a recent NY Times article, as mentioned by the author in a blog entry.

Such interdisciplinary collaboration is becoming more common, and not just in the science lab. A story in the WSJ earlier this year followed a capitalist who brings patent lawyers together with doctors, surgeons and scientists to brainstorm concepts. They get written down, and those that are applicable and profitable get written up as possible patents. Everyone gets compensated for their contribution if it becomes a product or service. (Unfortunately, I can't find the article.)

Coming back to the science world, there's the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, profiled by BusinessWeek in "Deconstructing Disease" whose vision is of "health care in which physicians predict who will develop certain diseases, and then tailor individual drug regimens to cure them." The institute was pioneered by Dr. Leroy Hood, considered the "godfather" of systems biology.

To understand the disease process, Hood believes, scientists must decode the complex biochemical pathways created by the more than 50,000 proteins that genes produce -- and link what they learn to the whole system. Only then can doctors figure out how to interfere with a pathway to cure or even prevent an illness.

This sums up how systems biology tackles the understanding of pathology. The relevant aspect of Dr. Hood's story is that he is "known for taking a cross-disciplinary approach to tackling diseases... [He has brought together] 180 specialists in biology, chemistry, math, and physics [to] work together to unlock a range of medical mysteries, from how cancer develops to how the immune system forms in childhood," according to the institute's website.

One doesn't have to be on an interdisciplinary team to find connections between seemingly unconnected things. Sometimes it can happen within someone's mind. In a section on success and failures in "The Medici Effect" is a story of a young medical student named Deborah Prothrow-Stith (now a public health professor at Harvard) who overcame many obstacles, especially from inside the medical establishment, to convince people that violence can and ought to be prevented.

The more [she] thought about it, the more she realized that physicians often got involved with prevention of harm by attempting to change patient behavior. She and other physicians pushed people to wear seatbelts, to eat right, to exercise, to avoid risky sexual behavior, and to avoid many other lifestyle hazards. But at the time they didn't do anything to prevent violence.

Is the interdisciplinary approach is ideal for ideation? Seems like it. After all, as a late 19th century conservationist John Muir once put it, "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."