Imagine: How Creativity Works

  For Bingham, the most troubling aspect of the drug-development model was its complete unpredictability. He had no idea which problems were solvable and which ones weren’t; he couldn’t anticipate how long the questions would take to answer, or where these answers would come from. “That’s what really worried me — I had no idea how to manage the R and D process,” Bingham says. “I didn’t know who should be working on what. And that’s when I started to wonder if all these supposedly impossible technical issues were really impossible. Maybe we just had the wrong people working on them? Maybe someone else could solve them? I always assumed that you hire the best resumé and give the problem to the guy with the most technical experience. But maybe that was a big mistake?”

  These troubling questions led Bingham to a radical conclusion: if Eli Lilly couldn’t predict which scientists would find the answer, then it needed to ask everyone the question. Instead of assigning its problems to particular experts inside the company, the corporation should make the problems public. “Needless to say, this strategy broke every rule of corporate R and D,” Bingham says. “Like every other company, Lilly was very secretive about its research projects, for competitive reasons,” he says. “You didn’t want anyone else to know what you were working on.” Bingham, though, was convinced that this secrecy came at a steep cost.

  And so, in June of 2001, Bingham launched a website called InnoCentive. The structure of the site was simple: Eli Lilly posted its hardest scientific problems online and attached a monetary reward to each challenge. If the problem was successfully solved, then the solver got the reward. (The money was the incentive part of InnoCentive.) “Mostly we just put up these really hard organic chemistry problems,” Bingham says. “I assumed there was little competitive risk, since a lot of these technical problems had also bedeviled our competitors. Frankly, I didn’t expect many of these challenges to ever get solved.”

  A few weeks passed. The InnoCentive site was mostly silent; Bingham thought his pilot project had failed. But then, after a month of nothing, a solution was submitted. And another. And another. “The answers just started pouring in,” Bingham says. “We got these great ideas from researchers we’d never heard of, pursuing angles that had never occurred to us. The creativity was simply astonishing.”

  After less than a year of operation, the website had become an essential R & D tool for Eli Lilly, allowing company scientists to benefit from the input of outsiders. By 2003, the site was so successful that it was spun off from its parent company and began featuring challenges from other large corporations, such as Procter and Gamble and General Electric. “These companies did the same thing Lilly had been doing,” Bingham says. “They’d post the stuff they couldn’t solve, put up a little prize money. Like us, they didn’t expect any useful answers. But then they’d often get the solution from some researcher living halfway around the world. It was thrilling. We felt like we’d accessed this great pool of talent.”

  InnoCentive has continued to expand at a rapid clip. It now features problems from hundreds of corporations and nonprofits in eight different scientific categories, from agricultural science to mathematics. The challenges on the site are incredibly varied and include everything from a multinational food company looking for a “reduced-fat chocolate-flavored compound coating” to an electronics firm trying to design a lithium-ion battery for a solar-powered computer. There are calls for a spray to protect corn stalks from insect damage, and a request for a software program that can “analyze the emotional responses of consumers in a crowded retail space.” More than two hundred thousand solvers have registered on the site, people who come from every conceivable scientific discipline and more than a hundred and seventy countries.

  The most impressive thing about InnoCentive, however, is its effectiveness. “When it comes down to it, the only reason companies use the site is because it works,” Bingham says. “It solves their hardest problems.” And this success isn’t merely anecdotal. In 2007, Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School, began analyzing hundreds of challenges posted on the site. According to Lakhani’s data, nearly 40 percent of the difficult problems posted on InnoCentive were solved within six months. Sometimes, the problems were solved within days of being posted online.

  Think, for a moment, about how strange this is: a disparate network of strangers managed to solve challenges that Fortune 500 companies like Eli Lilly, Kraft Foods, SAP, Dow Chemical, and General Electric — companies with research budgets in the billions of dollars — had been unable to solve. By studying how these challenges got solved, Lakhani was able to better understand the surprising success rate of InnoCentive. He could see why the online amateurs were able to answer questions that had frustrated the experienced scientists.

  The secret was outsider thinking: the problem solvers on InnoCentive were most effective when working at the margins of their fields. In other words, chemists didn’t solve chemistry problems, they solved molecular biology problems, just as molecular biologists solved chemistry problems. While these people were close enough to understand the challenges, they weren’t so close that their knowledge held them back and caused them to run into the same stumbling blocks as the corporate scientists. “Our results showed that when the solvers rated the problem as outside their own field, they were more likely to discover the answer,” Lakhani says. “Solvers were actually bridging knowledge fields — taking solutions and approaches from one area and applying them to other different areas. We have often heard that innovation occurs at the boundary of disciplines and now we have systematic evidence that this indeed is the case.”

  Ed Melcarek, a seven-time solver on InnoCentive, perfectly exemplifies this finding. Although Melcarek has a master’s degree in particle physics, he has never solved a physics challenge on InnoCentive. Instead, he peruses the chemistry and engineering categories on the site, searching for problems that might benefit from his expertise. A few years ago, he helped Colgate-Palmolive come up with a new way of injecting fluoride powder into tubes of toothpaste. (The old method sent plumes of fluoride dust into the factory.) Melcarek’s elegant solution involved imparting an electrical charge to the fluoride while grounding the plastic tube — the particles directed themselves straight inside. “It was really a very simple solution,” Melcarek told Wired. And yet, the same fix had eluded Colgate engineers for decades.

  There is something deeply counterintuitive about the success of InnoCentive. We assume that technical problems can be solved only by people with technical expertise; the researcher most likely to find the answer is the one most familiar with the terms of the question. But that assumption is wrong. The people deep inside a domain — the chemists trying to solve a chemistry problem — often suffer from a kind of intellectual handicap. As a result, the impossible problem stays impossible. It’s not until the challenge is shared with motivated outsiders that the solution can be found.

  Bingham likes to tell a story that demonstrates the power of InnoCentive. It involves a company that was trying to invent a polymer with a very unique and perplexing set of chemical properties. “Nobody was optimistic that InnoCentive could help the client,” Bingham says. However, after a few months, solvers on the website came up with five different solutions to the problem. “The company paid for all of the solutions,” Bingham says. “They paid awards to a person who studies carbohydrates in Sweden, a small agribusiness company, a retired aerospace engineer, a veterinarian, and a transdermal-drug-delivery-systems specialist. I guarantee that they would have found none of those people within their own company. They would have found none of those people if they had done a literature search in the field of interest. They would have found none of them by soliciting input from their consultants. And they probably wouldn’t have hired any of these people anyway, because none of them were qualified.”

  2.

  The world is full of natural outsiders, except we don’t call them outsiders; we refer to them as young people. The virtue of youth, after all, is t
hat the young don’t know enough to be insiders, cynical with expertise. While such ignorance has all sorts of obvious drawbacks, it also comes with creative advantages, which is why so many fields, from physics to punk rock, have been defined by their most immature members. The young know less, which is why they often invent more.

  The practical advantages of youth were first identified by Adolphe Quetelet, a nineteenth-century French mathematician. Quetelet’s project was simple: he plotted the number of successful plays produced by playwrights over the course of their careers. That’s when he discovered something unexpected: creativity doesn’t increase with experience. The playwrights weren’t getting better at writing plays. Instead, the curve exhibited a steep rise followed by a long, slow decline, a phenomenon of creative output now known as the inverted U curve. According to Quetelet, his curve demonstrated that creativity tends to peak after a few years of work — when we know enough, but not too much — before it starts to fall, in middle age.

  Dean Simonton, a psychologist at UC-Davis, has spent the last several decades expanding on Quetelet’s approach, sifting through vast amounts of historical data in search of the subtle patterns that influence creative production over time. For instance, Simonton has shown that physicists tend to make their most important discoveries early in their careers, typically before the age of thirty. The only field that peaks before physics is poetry.

  Why are young physicists and poets more creative? One possibility is that time steals ingenuity, that the imagination starts to wither in middle age. But that’s not the case — we are not biologically destined to get less creative. Simonton argues that youth benefit from their outsider status — they’re innocent and ignorant, which makes them more willing to embrace radical new ideas. Because they haven’t become encultured, or weighted down with too much conventional wisdom, they’re more likely to rebel against the status quo. (This also helps explain the disconnect between education and creativity. According to Simonton’s data, the ideal amount of college for a creative career is two years of undergraduate work. After that, school seems to actually inhibit the imagination. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at Claremont, is blunter. He notes that, in most instances, “school threatens to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls.) After a few years in the academy, Simonton says, the “creators start to repeat themselves, so that it becomes more of the same-old, same-old.” They have become insiders.

  But there is nothing inevitable about this process — creativity doesn’t have to slowly slip away. As Simonton notes, we can continue to innovate for our entire careers as long as we work to maintain the perspective of the outsider. Just look at the mathematician Paul Erdos, who was one of the most productive scientists of all time. Erdos was famous for hopscotching around his discipline, working with new people on new problems. He embraced a multiplicity of subjects, publishing influential papers on number theory, topology, combinatorics, and probability. At the first hint of boredom — and Erdos got bored very quickly — he would begin again, starting over with a new challenge and a blank sheet of paper. As a result, his creative output never declined; there was no U curve for his career, just a sharp rise followed by a flat line. (The Benzedrine didn’t hurt either.) “If you can keep finding new challenges, then you can think like a young person even when you’re old and gray,” Simonton says. “That idea gives me hope.”

  The moral is that outsider creativity isn’t a phase of life — it’s a state of mind. Of course, it’s not easy cultivating this useful mental state, at least once we get older. Sometimes we have to work a second job, mixing cocktails when we’re not programming insurance software. Sometimes we have to spend our free time working on confusing problems, or immersing ourselves in strange new fields, or wasting lots of bourbon on a crazy bacon experiment. We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don’t know what we’re talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.

  But sometimes that’s not enough: we need to leave behind everything. One of the most surprising (and pleasurable) ways of cultivating an outsider perspective is through travel, getting away from the places we spend most of our time. The reason travel is so useful for creativity involves a quirk of cognition in which problems that feel close get contemplated in a more literal manner. This means that when we are physically near the source of the problem, our thoughts are automatically constricted, bound by a more limited set of associations. While this habit can be helpful — it allows us to focus on the facts at hand — it also inhibits the imagination.

  Consider a field of corn. When you’re standing in the middle of a farm surrounded by the tall cellulose stalks and fraying husks, the air smelling faintly of fertilizer and popcorn, your mind is automatically drawn to thoughts related to the primary definition of corn, which is that it’s a plant, a cereal, a staple of midwestern farming. But imagine that same field of corn from a different perspective. Instead of standing on a farm, you’re now in a crowded city street dense with taxis and pedestrians. The plant will no longer be just a plant; instead, your vast neural network will pump out all sorts of associations. You’ll think about high-fructose corn syrup, obesity, and the Farm Bill; you’ll contemplate ethanol and the Iowa caucuses, those corn mazes for kids at state fairs, and the deliciousness of succotash made with bacon and lima beans. The noun is now a web of tangents, a vast loom of connections.

  And this is why travel is so helpful: When you escape from the place you spend most of your time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas previously suppressed. You start thinking about obscure possibilities — corn can fuel cars! — that never would have occurred to you if you’d stayed back on the farm. Furthermore, this expansive kind of cognition comes with practical advantages, since you can suddenly draw on a whole new set of possible solutions. (But it’s not enough to simply get on a plane; if you want to experience the creative benefits of travel, then you have to rethink its raison d’être. Most people, after all, escape to Paris so they don’t have to think about those troubles they left behind. But here’s the ironic twist: your mind is most likely to solve your stubbornest problems while you’re sitting in a swank Left Bank café. So instead of contemplating that buttery croissant, mull over those domestic riddles you just can’t solve. You have the breakthrough while on break.)

  Look, for instance, at a recent experiment led by the psychologist Lile Jia at Indiana University. He randomly divided a few dozen undergraduates into two groups, each of which were asked to list as many different modes of transportation as possible. (This is known as a creative generation task.) One group of students was told that the task was conceived by Indiana University students studying abroad in Greece, while the other group was told that it was conceived by Indiana students studying in Indiana. At first, it’s hard to believe that such a slight and seemingly irrelevant distinction would alter the performance of the subjects. Why would it matter where the task originated?

  Nevertheless, Jia found a striking difference between the two groups: when students were told that the task was imported from Greece, they came up with significantly more transportation possibilities. They didn’t limit their list to cars, buses, trains, and planes; they cited horses, triremes, spaceships, bicycles, and Segway scooters. Because the source of the problem was far away, the subjects felt less constrained by their local transport options; they didn’t think about getting around just in Indiana, they thought about getting around all over the world.

  In a second study, Jia found that Indiana University students were much better at solving a series of insight puzzles when told that the puzzles came from California and not from Indiana. Here’s a sample problem:

  A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found a rope in his cell that was half as long as required to permit him to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this
?

  The sense of distance from where the puzzle originated allowed these subjects to imagine a far wider range of alternatives, which made them more likely to solve the challenging brainteasers. (The answer to the sample problem is that the prisoner unraveled the rope lengthwise and tied the remaining strands together.) Instead of getting stuck and giving up, they were able to think about unusual associations, which eventually led to the right answer.

  The larger lesson is that our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded for efficiency; people think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. It’s not until we feel distant from the problems — far from our usual haunts — that the chains of cognition are loosened, and the insight becomes obvious.

  What’s more, the longer you’re away from home, the stronger the effect. In a 2009 study, researchers at INSEAD and the Kellogg School of Management reported that students who lived abroad for an extended period were significantly more likely to solve a difficult creativity problem than students who had never lived outside of their birth country. The experiment went like this: The students were given a cardboard box containing a few thumbtacks, a piece of corkboard, a book of matches, and a waxy candle. They were told to attach the candle to the piece of corkboard so that it could burn properly without dripping wax onto the floor. This is known as the Duncker candle problem, and it tends to make people very frustrated. In fact, nearly 90 percent of people pursue the same two failing strategies. They begin by tacking the candle directly to the board, which causes the candle wax to shatter. Then they attempt to melt the candle with the matches so that it sticks to the board. But the wax doesn’t hold; the candle falls to the floor. At this point, most people surrender. They assume thatthe puzzle is impossible, that it’s a stupid experiment and a waste of time. In fact, only a slim minority of subjects manage to come up with the solution, which involves attaching the candle to the cardboard box with wax and then tacking the cardboard box to the corkboard. Unless people have an insight about the box — that it can do more than hold thumbtacks — they’ll waste candle after candle, repeating their failures while waiting for a breakthrough. Psychologists refer to this as the bias of functional fixedness, since people are typically terrible at coming up with new functions for old things.