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In the 60’s and 70’s, a sociology professor named Gerald Gordon looked into factors that were conducive to innovation. What he and his colleagues found were two major abilities that were complementary to a person’s propensity to innovate: the ability to see the differences between things that seem similar and the ability to see the similarities between things that seem different. These two abilities can be summed up respectively as problem formulating and problem solving.

His team primarily focused on the phenomenon of “remote associations,” the ability to form new concepts from seemingly un-related information. An example of such would be Archimedes’ discovering the principle of displacement while in the bathtub. From this work, Gordon suggested what has become the Remote Associate Test (RAT), which measures one’s ability to both solve and recognize problems.

As you probably know, the ability to innovate does not mean you have superior real-world value. There are plenty of people who qualify as creatively smart but don’t get things done. In fact, many companies have started to use that as their mantra for hiring: smart and get things done.

People who get things done understand constraints. Without constraints you can just keep thinking of endless conceptual possibilities. Consider the idea that outside-the-box thinking doesn’t actually foster practical innovation as much as what could be considered inside-the-box thinking. The reasoning behind this is that constraints drive innovation. The Indie Game Jam comes to mind. The premise of TLC’s Trading Spaces is another example of constraints leading to innovation.

Proponents of thinking inside-the-box argue that it will keep you based in reality while allowing you to think beyond the obvious. Thinking beyond the obvious sounds a lot like thinking outside the box to me. Maybe it’s a different box, but I think this whole box model is flawed. There’s obviously some multidimensionality going on here.

Put abstractly, think outside the box, as long as you can think inside the box. Fortunately, very little in reality is truly dichotomous. You can do both. In fact, if you model thinking inside the box as looking for differences in seemingly similar things, and thinking outside the box as looking for similarities in seeminly different things… well, you get something that looks like the graph at the top.

Think at the edge of the box.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 11:46 am and is filed under Abstract. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.