Melissa A. Schilling - Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World

Everyone whos ever taken a shower has had an idea. Its the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.

Nolan Bushnell

W hy are some people so remarkably innovative? Not the one-hit wonders with a single great idea or the people who seize a unique opportunity offered by a moment in time, but the people who create one game-changing innovation after another: people who spend most of their lives generating and pursuing startling ideas, challenging assumptions, and accomplishing the seemingly impossible. Is there something special about them that makes them so willing and able to change the world? Consider, for example, Elon Musk.

Musk created and sold his first video game when he was twelve and became a millionaire by the time he turned twenty-eight. Over the next ten years he developed an electronic payment system that would be merged into a company we now know as PayPal; founded SpaceX, a company with no less of an objective than to colonize Mars; and helped to create Tesla Motors, the first new-car company to go public in the United States in more than fifty years. In 2010 SpaceX successfully launched a spacecraft into orbit and then brought it safely back to Earth, a remarkable achievement that hitherto had been accomplished only by the national governments of three countries: the United States, Russia, and China. Furthermore, he demonstrated the viability of reusable rockets, something the space industry had long said was impossible.

Musk did not come from a family with strong connections to any of these industries, nor did he come from exceptional wealth or political advantage. Musk did not grow up with any special access to computing, automotive, or space technology prior to founding these companies, nor did he spend years accumulating unusually deep experience in these fields prior to his innovations. Thus, he had no special experience or resources that enabled him to accomplish these featshis successes seem to have been attained through sheer force of will. What made Musk both able to and driven to create such a remarkable series of profoundly important innovations?

Nikola Tesla (the man for whom Musks car company is named) was equally prolific, or perhaps even more so. During his lifetime he achieved more than two hundred stunningly advanced innovations, including the first long-distance wireless communication systems, alternating-current electrical systems, and remote-control robots. His fervor in pursuit of innovation was hard for most people to understand, especially given the skepticism and lack of financing he encountered throughout his life. Like Musk, Tesla had no family background or other advantage in the fields he would come to revolutionize. Although he studied physics in college, it is not clear that he ever completed a degree. Also like Musk, he left his home country as a young man and arrived in the United States nearly penniless. Tesla was an unusual man, to put it mildly. He was riddled with phobias and odd habits, and he lacked the kind of social intelligence and charisma that could have made it easier to get financial support for his projects. Yet also like Musk, he would accomplish a series of technological achievements that most observers had deemed impossible.

Albert Einstein achieved equally remarkable accomplishments in physics: during a four-month period, when he was all of twenty-six years old, he wrote four papers that completely altered the scientific worlds understanding of space, time, mass, and energy. Each was a significant breakthrough, including work on particle physics that would set the stage for quantum mechanics to overthrow classical physics. What is all the more remarkable is that he accomplished these feats while working as a patent examiner because every physics department he applied to turned him down for an academic post. His disrespect for authority had earned him the ire of his college professors, and they refused to support him in his quest for a university position. Even after writing his four remarkable papers, he faced considerable resistance: having the impudence to challenge well-established theories and being Jewish in a time of rampant anti-Semitism combined to make him the subject of frequent attacks. These attacks made his life harder, but they did not induce him to show more reverence for the work of his peers. For Einstein, bowing to authorityincluding the authority of social normswas a corruption of the human spirit. He had no intention of marching to anyone elses drum. This stance would make it harder for him to gain support and legitimacy for his ideas, yet it also freed him to think beyond the existing theories of his time. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize and become, arguably, the most famous scientist of all time.

What is it, then, that makes these people so spectacularly innovative? Is it genetics, parenting, education, or luck? Although innovation has long been a popular research topic in both psychology and business, we dont have good answers to the question. In part this is because serial breakthrough innovatorspeople who are extreme outliers of innovative productivitydont make great research subjects. Because they are rare, its next to impossible to gather data on a large sample of them and run statistical analyses. And because they are busy, you would have an equally hard time getting them into a laboratory to run experiments. Thus, in business schools we tend to focus our research on problems such as how to organize innovation teams, how to choose alliance partners, and how to structure ideation exercises. Those are, after all, things we can measure and manage. The innovation research has not told us where serial breakthrough innovators come from, nor has it told us how we can foster breakthrough innovation in ourselves, in people with whom we work, or in our children.