Range - David Epstein Page 0,83

spools it could be mistaken for shimmering wrapping paper. It is a multibillion-dollar invention that is good for the environment. So how is it that nobody had looked at a plastic water bottle that way before? A recently published technical book for optics experts “said this technology is not capable of precision,” Ouderkirk recalled. “It was written by a real subject matter expert. He’s writing a whole book on this topic, so he knew his stuff. The problem is, he didn’t know the adjacent stuff.”

In 2013, R&D Magazine named Ouderkirk Innovator of the Year. Over three decades at 3M, he was named on 170 patents. Along the way, he became fascinated with the ingredients of invention, inventive teams, and individual inventors themselves. He eventually decided to investigate those ingredients systematically. He teamed up with an analytics expert and a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. They found that it has quite a bit to do with “the adjacent stuff.”

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Ouderkirk and the other two researchers who set out to study inventors at 3M wanted to know what profile of inventor made the greatest contributions. They found very specialized inventors who focused on a single technology, and generalist inventors who were not leading experts in anything, but had worked across numerous domains.

They examined patents, and with Ouderkirk’s internal access to 3M, the actual commercial impact inventors made. The specialists and the generalists, they found, both made contributions. One was not uniformly superior to the other. (They also found inventors who had neither significant depth nor breadth—they rarely made an impact.) The specialists were adept at working for a long time on difficult technical problems, and for anticipating development obstacles. The generalists tended to get bored working in one area for too long. They added value by integrating domains, taking technology from one area and applying it in others. Neither an inventor’s breadth nor their depth alone predicted the likelihood that one of their inventions would win the Carlton Award—the “Nobel Prize of 3M.”

Ouderkirk’s group unearthed one more type of inventor. They called them “polymaths,” broad with at least one area of depth. An inventor’s depth and breadth were measured by their work history. The U.S. Patent Office categorizes technology into four hundred fifty different classes—exercise devices, electrical connectors, marine propulsion, and myriad more. Specialists tended to have their patents in a narrow range of classes. A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area—so they had numerous patents in that area—but they were not as deep as the specialists. They also had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths’ breadth increased markedly as they learned about “the adjacent stuff,” while they actually lost a modicum of depth. They were the most likely to succeed in the company and to win the Carlton Award. At a company whose mission is to constantly push technological frontiers, world-leading technical specialization by itself was not the key ingredient to success.

Ouderkirk is a polymath. He had been interested in chemistry since his second-grade teacher showed off a model volcano eruption. He took a winding path from a community college in northern Illinois to a chemistry PhD, to working completely outside of his chemistry background in a laser lab when he arrived at 3M. “What I was taught is to become a world expert in the rate of vibrational energy transfer between [gas-phase] molecules,” he said. “What nobody ever told me in my whole career is that, not only is that good, but it’s also good to know a little bit about everything else.” Ouderkirk’s patents range from optics to metal working to dentistry. The patent office frequently registered individual inventions he worked on under several classes at once, because they merged technological domains.

He became so interested in classifying innovators that he wrote a computer algorithm to analyze ten million patents from the last century and learn to identify and classify different types of inventors. Specialist contributions skyrocketed around and after World War II, but