Experts Sharing Their Insights With Other Disciplines Needs To Be The New Norm

“Experts sharing their insights with other disciplines needs to be the new norm” - Kathryn Myronuk, Singularity University.

When you get a group of people together from a diverse background, whether that’s cultural or educational, you can spark ideas that would not otherwise have occurred to them. This is the idea behind some of the work being done by Singularity University.

Singular University brings together individuals from totally different backgrounds to their Silicon Valley campus in order to share ideas and discuss problems with the aim of sparking innovative ideas. This is not about getting different engineering departments together, but rather mixing every possible field, from every country and socio-economic background.

One example of an innovative solution that has come from this way of working is the use of a piece of equipment that many people take for granted in their own home, but would never think of applying to the blood testing; a blu-ray player. This is a cheap piece of technology that can be hacked into a centrifuge for separating samples and then make use of the blu-ray laser for analysing them.

So rather than sticking to our own teams, groups and areas of expertise, lets start thinking about how we can mix it up a bit and come up with something unexpected.

Takeaways:

Diversity is good for sparking innovative ideas
Sharing experience and expertise can motivate unexpected ideas in others
Don’t be afraid to get involved in a field that you don’t know much about
Don’t be afraid to get people that don’t know much about your field involved with your problems