Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Let me ask you a question about the ability to innovate.
Can you be taught?
How many of you think that creativity is innate -
you have it or you don't?
Show of hands.
How many of you think that with instruction
you can become a really fine innovator?
Woah. Great.
Well, it turns out you're both right.
To some degree, you're born with the characteristics
that make you a better, or not so good, innovator.
On the other hand,
30 years of research has shown us
that well designed creativity-training programs
can, in fact, improve your innovative thinking skills,
and today I'm going to tell you how.
I'm the dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health,
and I'm a scientist.
And I can promise you that I never took a class in innovative thinking,
because classes like that barely exist within science curricula.
But about 10 years ago, my boss called me into the office,
and he said, "Roberta, you're doing a great job.
You know, getting lots of grants, publishing lots of papers.
But I wonder if you're actually moving the needle.
I wonder if you're taking the risks to leap your science forward.
And my reaction to that was - well, I was pissed.
(Laughter)
My second reaction was that I was afraid
because, essentially,
he was asking me to move from a place where I was successful
to a place that I could be putting out crazy ideas
that would get me laughed out of my profession.
Nonetheless, I started into what I call "my summer projects,"
the last of which was writing a book about what we're talking about today.
But mostly these were science papers,
and they took a question and kind of looked at it from the side.
And they tried to get science to just move in a slightly different direction.
Some of those were pretty successful - I'll tell you about one of those later.
But the point is that I learned that I had the innate ability to innovate,
but I had been too afraid to use it,
and I wonder if to some degree that may be true for you.
Last year, Newsweek published this cover story,
and when you turned inside,
you saw an article entitled "The Creativity Crisis."
It reported that school-age children in America for the last 20 years
have been gaining points on IQ tests,
but they've been losing points on standardized tests of creativity.
So our children are getting less creative.
About the same time,
the National Academies of Science published a report
which suggested that the same thing may be happening in American science,
that we're actually losing our edge on innovation.
Now, at this point, you should stop me,
and you should say,
"What? Are you crazy? Come on. Look around you.
Technology is rocketing forward."
But my response would be,
"If you look at the major threats to mankind -
global warming, the obesity epidemic, Alzheimer's disease, cancer -
science is making slow and unsteady progress,
and I worry that that is for lack of imagination."
Now, while this is going on,
our desire for innovation has never been greater.
Google the word, and you will get 250 million hits.
And if you ask CEOs of major American companies
what's the primary characteristic they're looking for in their work force,
guess what it is.
Innovation, right.
So, we have a demand-and-supply problem.
What are we going to do?
Well, I'm going to give you a little peek
into a course that I teach on innovative thinking.
The main concept in this course is something called "frames."
Frames define our thinking.
They are the set of expectations that we use to interpret new information.
Let me give you an example.
So, you go to a restaurant,
and the waitress brings you a plate of steaming linguine
and says, "Is there anything more I can get you?"
And you ask for the Parmesan cheese,
and she smiles and nods and says, "Go to the kitchen and get it yourself."
(Laughter)
That's a frame break, okay?
It's not what you were expecting.
It demonstrates two really important characteristics of frames.
One, they are ubiquitous.
So within any social setting, usually you're working within a frame.
For instance, here in the auditorium today,
you have certain expectations about what others are going to do.
So if the person sitting next to you
were to sneeze
and then grab your sleeve and wipe their nose on it ...
(Laughter)
Okay, it would be a little strange. You'd be surprised.
That brings us to the second characteristic of frames,
which is that they are not just cognitive, but they are emotional.
And so when someone breaks your frame,
you have a powerful and visceral rejection reaction.
But to innovate, we must break frames.
So doing that,
even though you might want to,
is, really, not an easy thing to do,
and it takes practice.
Now, speaking of practice,
of course, every good class, like this, has a test.
It's time for our test.
I'd like you to please close your books and take out a piece of paper and pencil.
No, just kidding.
But I would like to see if you can solve this mystery.
(Video) Gary and Nancy are lying dead on the floor.
Around them is a puddle of water and some shards of broken glass.
What were the circumstances of their death?
So how many of you are thinking CSI - right? You got this one down.
Well, what if I told you that the easiest way to solve the mystery
is that Gary and Nancy are fish;
his fishbowl broke.
Okay?
So you may not have jumped to that conclusion,
and the reason that you didn't is because names imply humanity.
So, actually, to find that solution, you had to break a frame.
So it turns out that frame-breaking is not an easy thing to do.
So I'm going to help you out today, and I'm going to give you a few tools.
The first tool is observation.
To be a great innovator, you must be a great observer.
I want you to close your eyes for a second
and see if you can imagine the face of your cellphone.
I want you to think about where every number and every letter goes
or where every app goes.
Okay. Now open your eyes.
Did it look something like this?
Well, it turns out that this is a really hard thing to do.
Despite the fact that you look at your cellphone dozens of times a day,
almost no one can get this exactly correct.
Why is that?
Well, we are confronted with so much sensory information;
it's so overwhelming that we really can't process it all,
and so we have to process it through a filter.
And that's our frames.
We don't expect it and we don't see it.
Which brings us to the story
of Warren and Marshall and the 2005 Nobel Prize
for their discovery of the link between H pylori and stomach ulcers.
Now, Warren was a pathologist,
and he was looking at these biopsy slides from patients with peptic ulcers,
and he noticed these funny little dots.
He tried to make them go away, but he couldn't.
So he hooked up with a newly-minted gastroenterologist named Marshall,
and between the two of them,
they decided that these were bacteria.
Now, that was such a revolutionary idea
that they were ostracized by the scientific profession.
And in order to prove it,
Marshall actually drank a Petri dish full of H pylori
and caused himself to get a stomach ulcer.
Well, fortunately, H pylori is easily treated with antibiotics,
and this was a major breakthrough for medicine.
But here's the point for us today:
Warren actually saw these little bugs
without any special microscope and without any special stains.
Why was he the only one that saw it
even though it was right in front of everyone's eyes?
And the answer is
because the frame at the time said that bacteria couldn't be there,
that they could not grow in the acidic environment of the stomach.
A second tool is reversal.
Darwin is famous
for his theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
The frame at the time was creationism.
It said God creates every creature to perfection.
Darwin flipped that.
He said I believe Mother Nature
couldn't give a hoot about the random mutations
that she throws into the environment to compete for survival.
Darwin also used another tool, which was change your point of view.
He wondered, How is it that one characteristic
is able to compete against another and become more common in the population?
And to answer that,
he had to figure out, How do organisms adapt to their environment?
And so to do that, he imagined himself as a plant -
this is actually a true story - he imagined himself as a plant.
A third tool is analogies.
Modern-day science analogies
have brought us the design for new semiconductor chips
on the basis of the child's toy Etch A Sketch
and the design for new shipping patterns
on the basis of the swarming behavior of ants.
In the classroom, we use exercises to try to hone our analogy-making skills,
such as, How is a marriage like a matchbox?
Here's what my students said:
(Video) They spark. They strike each other -
not that we want ...
Roberta Ness: How is a dream like a dryer?
(Video) Forget about it - it can shrink or get ruined.
RN: How is history like a mango?
(Video) Both can be altered to suit your purpose.
(Laughter)
The students are always better than me, right?
So, I promised I was going to tell you a story about one of my summer projects,
and I wanted to wait until I had given you some of the tools
so that you can see if you can find the tools embedded in this story.
So, I was asked to look at the problem of ovarian cancer,
and as you may know, that's a terrible disease.
In fact, I became involved
in a walk to raise money for research on ovarian cancer,
and of the 10 women
who, as friends, started out walking together in the first year,
by the fifth year, only two of them were left.
So I realized that science, medicine has made very little progress
on improving the life expectancy of these women.
And what I really wanted to do
was to make sure that no one ever gets ovarian cancer in the first place.
And so to do that,
I had to figure out what the cause is.
So, it occurred to me
that the cells that line the ovary are the same cells that line our airways.
And just like smoking causes inflammation,
which triggers mutagenesis and, thereby, lung cancer,
I wondered if the same thing might happen in the ovary.
Well, since then we've actually been able to find some inflammants
that may trigger ovary cancer,
and we've been able to find ways to prevent those.
Moreover, colleagues from around the world
have actually come up with the idea
of potentially vaccinating against ovary cancer
in order to prevent it,
just like you would prevent an inflammatory, infectious disease.
So when you leave here today,
there are two things you can immediately do
to improve your innovation thinking skills.
First, when you're confronted with a new idea that brings you up short,
you can think, hmm,
What was the frame when I was reacting that way?
Is there alternative frame I could be using?
And when you're working on a thorny problem,
you can try flipping it.
You can try changing your point of view.
And the second thing you can do is simply to be more open to new ideas.
When you were a little kid, you may have taken out your coloring book,
and you may have scribbled the grass purple
and the girl's hair or the boy's hair orange.
I encourage you and your children to discover your innovation muse,
to find the joy in coloring outside the lines.
Thank you.
(Applause)