Hack:
Da Vinci and the Board Room

Jeff and his team wrote a book that John Wiley & Sons published in 2009 called ‘Conquering Innovation Fatigue’. There was a section in the book on multi-disciplinary innovators. Part of the issue is that we have so many people talking about people like Da Vinci. They view these people as great rare solitary geniuses. If you poke around and look at what Da Vinci was doing there is a pretty strong case that he really drew very heavily on a lot of other material that may in fact have originated in China. There was an amazing book in China published almost a century before his time. A lot of what he was doing was really improving and drawing connections based on material and innovation already out there. He has been given way too much credit as an inventor and far less credit as a connector and innovator.  An example in the book called Da Vinci in the Board Room suggests that once we recognize that Da Vinci’s skills may have been more in connecting and open innovation, as opposed to being a genius inventor on his own, we can suggest that businesses would do a lot better to have more Da Vinci’s in their midst. What are needed are not more rare geniuses, but heavy connected multi-disciplinary people who can draw boundaries between these disciplines. This can lead to a lot of innovation without necessarily having to invent everything from scratch.

See full interview here