Three Distinct Forces Behind the Rise of Creative Intersections

In The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson explains how and why breakthrough creativity happens at the Intersection of different fields, ideas, people, and cultures.

This is a revised, updated, and expanded edition of a book first published in 2004, with a new preface by Teresa Amabile and a discussion guide that will help facilitate, indeed expedite application of Johansson’s valuable insights as to how and why breakthrough creativity happens at the Intersection of different fields, ideas, people, and cultures.

As Johansson explains, the Intersection “becomes a place for wildly different ideas to bump into and build upon each other…The name I have given this phenomenon, The Medici Effect, comes from a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth century Italy.”

Intersectional collisions of ideas can occur almost any tine and anywhere, involving and engaging almost anyone in structured or spontaneous collaboration between and among “multiple fields, generating ideas that leap in new directions – what I call intersectional ideas.”

Those who were engaged in the Manhattan Project offer the best example I can think of. What they achieved together could only be done at an Intersection rather than within the field of nuclear physics or mathematics…or both.

“There are three distinct forces behind the rise of Intersections, and at this moment, perhaps for the first time, they are all working together. They are not the only reasons that intersectional innovations happen, but they explain why we are seeing more of them than ever before.”

Force 1: The Movement of People

“These trends – the blending and mixing of cultures – are becoming more evident every year in fields such as cinema, literature, music, and art. Businesses, too, will increasingly be able to innovate in different regions of the world. They can arbitrage ideas between different cultures by understanding how these cultures connect. This holds true not just for major corporations but also for your neighborhood store.”

Force 2: The Convergence of Science

“There are more questions to explore than ever before, but a great many of the discoveries will be of a different nature than in the past. Instead of helping us to understand the individual pieces of the world, they will help us understand how those pieces interact. So, for instance, you will find engineers collaborating with biologists to understand the toughness of the conch shell and apply it to everything from tank armor to auto bodies. Or you will see oceanographers, meteorologists, geologists, physicists, chemists, and biologists collaborating to understand the effects of global warning. New discoveries, world-changing discoveries, will come from the intersections of disciplines, not from within them.”

Force 3: The Leap of Computation

“This exponential leap in computation [i.e. invention of the microchip] 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 [begin italics] different [end italics] things, generating possible intersections between traditionally separate fields.

“The second reason is that the leap in computation has also led to advanced communication. The microchip has paved the way for e-mail, the World Wide Web, mobile phones, satellite phones, television, and cheaper phone calls. It has made our world smaller. That means that individuals, groups, and organizations that used to be separate can now easily come together to find intersections between their backgrounds and expertise. This provides opportunities for both small start-ups and established companies.”

Frans explains all this thoroughly on Pages 22-32.

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The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation was published by Harvard Business Review Press (2004; March 2017).

To learn more about Frans and his brilliant work, please click here.

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