Bruce Nussbaum poses the conjecture that engineers, scientists and mathematicians are not good at innovation. Good at invention: yes; innovation: not so much. From Bruce’s article:
Innovation is about social applications of inventions, not about the inventions themselves. Engineers, scientists and mathematicians don’t get this. It’s not part of their culture. We see time and again, engineeering-driven corporate cultures failing because they don’t address the social needs of their customers and they don’t address the social ramifications of invention.
I recently put forward the opinion that a scientific mindset is good at solving particular types of problems. Those solutions can even be quite creative and, yes, innovative. Those are the types of problems engineers, scientists and mathematicians apply themselves to day after day.
But they’re less well suited to solving the sorts of problems we face when the ground falls out from under our feet. When the market crumbles and the economy sheds jobs. When a new technology or material opens up completely new opportunities for the way we do things as well as what we do. The discontinuous, big, disruptive changes that we’re facing at the moment. In fact, the sort of disruption we seem to face every 5-10 years.
In between those times, that scientific mindset and the linear, incrementalist approach to solving problems is perfectly suited to the task at-hand; but that’s not where we’re at right now. But we’ll be back in that zone in a year or two, and we’ll be needing the sort of mindset that tends to reside in our sciencey folks.
In the meantime, the problems we face need a different approach, and on that point I agree with Bruce.