THE MEDICI EFFECT

THE MEDICI EFFECT
Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts & Cultures
Frans Johansson
Harvard Business School Press, 2004

This fascinating book tells us about working at the intersection of different fields to generate and implement creative ideas. Opportunities to innovate may be limited within a field. But they multiply when different fields are combined. That is the key message in this book.

The key difference between a field and an intersection of fields lies in how concepts within them are combined. When we operate within a field, we can combine concepts within that particular field, generating ideas that evolve along a particular direction. The author calls them directional ideas. When we work at the intersection, we combine concepts between multiple fields, generating ideas that leap in new directions. The author calls them intersectional ideas.

Directional innovation improves a product in fairly predictable steps, along a well-defined dimension. The goal is to evolve an established idea by using refinements and adjustments. The rewards are reasonably predictable and attained without a long gestation period.

Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, pave the way for a new field. They often make it possible for the people who originated them to become the leaders in the fields they created. Intersectional innovations do not require as much depth of expertise as directional innovation and can be executed by seemingly ordinary people.

For most of us, the best chance to innovate lies at the intersection. Not only is the probability of finding remarkable idea combinations greater there, we will also find many more of them.


There are three distinct forces behind the rise of intersections.
The movement of people is on the rise everywhere. This is facilitating cultural intersections in fields such as cinema, literature, music, and art. Businesses, too, are increasingly able to innovate in different regions of the world. They can arbitrage ideas between different cultures by understanding how those cultures connect.

The second reason is that in field after field, our basic understanding of the world is reaching a point of saturation. We have a pretty good understanding of the individual components of the world. In the near future, the chances of making a radical discovery are slim. So the emphasis will be less on understanding each component and more on how those components interact.

Last but not the least, computing power has been doubling every eighteen months and continues to do so. This exponential leap in computation will generate more intersections for two reasons. First, it will not merely let us do the same things faster (which enables directional innovation). It will also allow us to do different things, generating possible intersections between traditionally separate fields. The leap in computation has also led to advances in communication, making our world smaller. Individuals, groups, and organizations that were once separate can now easily come together to find intersections between their backgrounds and expertise.

Read this fascinating book to know more about intersectional innovations.