TheThreePercent

If you had to guess where to find a higher percentage of innovators than the average, where would they be?  A lot of people would assume that they are lurking inside research labs, slugging back Diet Cokes and turning pizza into warp drive and cancer eating nanobots.

Nope.  ThreePercent.  That’s what we see.  About three percent of the scientists we have observed are actually engaged in what we would call innovation.

Here is an excerpt from the wikipedia entry on innovation:  “Innovation occurs when someone uses an invention – or uses existing tools in a new way – to change how the world works, how people organize themselves, and how they conduct their lives.” 

If this is a good way to understand innovation, then the ‘perpetrators’ of innovation show up in the same percentages on the benches of physics labs as they do on the assembly line of a tractor company.  No kidding. 

Fact is that most scientists are a lot like Sou Chefs.  They come into work, look up a recipe they have been given, cook the dish, and wash their hands before they head home.  Nothing wrong with this.  Needs to happen.  But let’s not confuse it with innovating.  Let’s not mix up research with creativity, creativity with invention, or invention with innovation.  These are all different things, and TheThreePercent is about that last one….just because.

So when TheThreePercent interviews researchers, scientists, and other lab animals, you are going to get something different.  Anyone can get the publicity pack from a lab’s communications department and gush about the potential of quantum computing or the latest drug target.  What is hard is finding the two or three innovators in a lab of a hundred researchers and getting them to spill the beans about how they intend to shake things up.

If that sort of thing is interesting or inspiring to you, stay tuned.