The Medici Effect

I recently attended a highly absorbing workshop. We played the Medici game on innovation facilitated by Waltraut Ritter, a reputed international consultant and Director of Knowledge Enterprise, Hong Kong.

The Medici game is based on the best selling book The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. The book is titled after the Medicis, a group of businessmen in Italy who funded various innovative ventures that helped in triggering off the Renaissance, a period of great innovation and a watershed event in human civilization. Thanks to the Medicis, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, painters and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they learned from one another and broke barriers between disciplines and cultures. They unleashed a wave of innovation which would impress even today’s Silicon Valley.

Johansson has drawn a distinction between Directional (Incremental) innovation and Intersectional (Radical) innovation in his book.

As many would know, incremental innovation involves making minor changes over time to sustain the growth of a company without making sweeping changes to products or looking at totally new markets. On the other hand, radical/breakthrough innovation is about launching a totally new product, process or service. This kind of innovation requires bringing together divergent ideas from different fields. For radical innovations to happen, people need to have a broad knowledge in different areas in addition to deep specialization in their domain area.

Johanson argues that the basic understanding of individual disciplines has progressed so much that any further improvement is possible only at the intersection of two or more disciplines. He makes the crucial point that the pay offs from innovation capital will be greater by linking up seemingly unconnected ideas than by trying to develop deeper and deeper expertise in any one discipline.

The characteristics of intersectional innovations are –
a) They are surprising and fascinating
b) They take leaps in new direction
c) They open up entirely new fields
d) They create space (a concept called Blue Ocean Strategy by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne)
e) They allow a new entrant to become market leader overnight

According to Johanson, the three drivers of intersectional innovation (facilitated by globalization and advances in information technology and communication) are
a) Movement of people
b) Mingling of cultures
c) Rise of computing power which enables us to do things faster and try out different things in a cost effective way


The workshop helped in exploding various commonly held myths related to innovation.

For more information, please read the book, The Medici Effect, or visit the website www.themedicieffect.com

You may also read " How breakthroughs happen" (Harvard Business School press, 2003)by Andrew Hargadon who has covered similar ideas in this book.