Range - David Epstein Page 0,70
molecular synthesis solution came from a lawyer whose relevant knowledge came from working on chemical patents. The man wrote, “I was thinking of tear gas,” when he came up with the solution. It was his version of Bingham’s cream of tartar. “Tear gas didn’t have anything to do with the problem,” Bingham said. “But he saw parallels to the chemical structure of a molecule that we needed.”
Bingham had noticed that established companies tended to approach problems with so-called local search, that is, using specialists from a single domain, and trying solutions that worked before. Meanwhile, his invitation to outsiders worked so well that it was spun off as an entirely separate company. Named InnoCentive, it facilitates entities in any field acting as “seekers,” paying to post “challenges” and rewards for outside “solvers.” A little more than one-third of challenges were completely solved, a remarkable portion given that InnoCentive selected for problems that had stumped the specialists who posted them. Along the way, InnoCentive realized it could help seekers tailor their posts to make a solution more likely. The trick: to frame the challenge so that it attracted a diverse array of solvers. The more likely a challenge was to appeal not just to scientists but also to attorneys and dentists and mechanics, the more likely it was to be solved.
Bingham calls it “outside-in” thinking: finding solutions in experiences far outside of focused training for the problem itself. History is littered with world-changing examples.
Napoleon once fretted that his armies could only carry a few days’ worth of provisions. “Hunger is more savage than the sword,” a fourth-century Roman military chronicler wrote. The French emperor was a science and technology booster, so in 1795 he offered a reward for research on food preservation. A raft of the world’s most formidable minds had been working on the problem for more than a century, including Irish scientist Robert Boyle, the “father of modern chemistry.” Where great minds of science failed, Parisian foodie and confectioner Nicolas Appert prevailed.
Appert was a “jack of all trades,” according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. He had traversed the gustatory universe as a candy maker, vintner, chef, brewer, pickle maker, and more. His exceptionally wide-ranging culinary wanderings gave him an advantage over scientists who focused on the science of preservation. “Having spent my days in the pantries, the breweries, store-houses, and cellars of Champagne, as well as in the shops, manufactories, and warehouses of confectioners, distillers, and grocers,” he wrote in the aptly titled Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years, “I have been able to avail myself, in my process, of a number of advantages, which the greater number of those persons have not possessed, who have devoted themselves to the art of preserving provisions.” He placed food inside of thick champagne bottles, which he sealed to make airtight and then placed in boiling water for hours. Appert’s innovation begat canned food. He preserved a whole sheep in a crock just to show it off. His solution preserved nutrients so well that scurvy, the vitamin C deficiency known as “the sailor’s nightmare,” went from deadly curse to avoidable nuisance. The main scientific epiphany—heat kills microbes—was still sixty years from being discovered by Louis Pasteur. Appert’s method revolutionized public health, and, unfortunately for Napoleon, crossed the English Channel. In 1815, it fed the English troops at Waterloo.
Alph Bingham’s critics were aware that clever outsiders and dilettantes had made technical breakthroughs in the past, but they assumed it was purely that, an artifact of the past that would not translate into the era of hyperspecialization. Help us, an international pharmaceutical giant, conceive and create a molecule that we will use as a stepping-stone to synthesize some other molecule so obscure that we don’t mind sharing this information publicly, because we’re stuck and nobody outside our walls will have any idea where we’re going with this anyway. Even Bingham’s expectations proved too humble when it came to the contributions of outside-in solvers to problems that stumped specialists. “When a problem NASA worked on for thirty years gets solved,” he told me, “I’m definitely still surprised.”
Specifically, NASA was unable to predict solar particle storms, radioactive material spewed by the sun that can gravely damage astronauts and the equipment they depend on. Solar physicists were understandably skeptical that outsiders could help, but after three decades of being stuck, there was nothing to lose; NASA posted through InnoCentive in 2009. Within six months, Bruce Cragin, an engineer retired from