Quantity and quality

The innovation blog

They were the best of ideas, they were the worst of ideas. Or so Charles Dickens so nearly said at the start of ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’. As a disturbingly prolific writer, Dickens would almost certainly have agreed with Frans Johansson who suggests in his book ‘The Medici Effect’ that there is a direct correlation between quality of ideas and quantity of ideas. “Pablo Picasso, for instance, produced 20,000 pieces of art; Einstein more than 240 papers and Richard Branson has founded over 250 companies.”

Johansson challenges the conventional mythology of innovation – the idea that innovators get caught in a “virtuous cycle” where past success breeds future opportunities and success – by pointing out that, for example, we play only about 35% of Mozart’s compositions, view only a fraction of Picasso’s works and seldom reference most of Einstein’s papers. Why is this?

Because one great innovation does not guarantee another. Johansson cites research by psychologist Dean Simonton, author of ‘Origins Of Geniu’s, who says: “Innovators don’t produce because they are successful, they are successful because they produce”. So they can be having their best ideas at the same time as they’re having their worst. The really scary aspect of Simonton’s research – both for innovators and for the companies that employ them – is that it suggests scientists don’t produce breakthrough papers in any predictive pattern. They are far more likely to produce their most influential work at random points throughout their careers.