Books about innovation, curiosity and scientific creativity, reviewed by Margaret Harris
Teaching innovation
How do you define innovation? For Roberta Ness, it is simply “creativity with a purpose”, and the aim of her book Innovation Generation is to teach people how to think more creatively. To this end, she identifies a series of discrete stages in the innovation process, from “phrasing the question” properly to generating ideas, incubating them and eventually disseminating them to an appreciative world. Ness’s background is in public health, so many of her examples naturally lean towards the life sciences. Her book is also strongly US-centric, and UK readers will get a good laugh at Ness’s suggestion that they – unlike their benighted American counterparts – do not have to apply for financial support via an “arduous and lengthy…process of peer-reviewed grant submissions” for each experiment they wish to do. But the biggest problem with Innovation Generation is that the book itself is not terribly innovative. In fact, a fair amount of it feels like it has been recycled (with attribution) from earlier books in the science-lite genre, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics and James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Readers who enjoyed those books will enjoy this one too – but only if they can overcome their sense of déjà vu at seeing familiar anecdotes repurposed.
- 2012 Oxford University Press £18.99/$29.95hb 272pp
No easy answers
If Innovation Generation‘s “let’s break this down into steps” approach to scientific creativity strikes you as overly simplistic, you might want to pick up Drive and Curiosity instead. In it, chemist-turned-science-historian Istvan Hargittai profiles 15 innovative scientists and tries to explain how (and why) they made their career-defining discoveries. His chosen 15 include: the DNA pioneer James Watson; Watson’s sometime rival, Linus Pauling; and two physicists, Peter Mansfield and Rosalyn Yalow, who made Nobel-winning breakthroughs in biomedicine. After analysing the character traits and personal circumstances of all 15, Hargittai concludes that they do not, in fact, have much in common. The only unifying traits he can find are the “drive and curiosity” of the book’s title and, as he puts it, “Drive and curiosity do not always yield discovery, and when they do, the discovery is usually a minor one.” Moreover, a factor that benefits one person might well be disastrous for another. For example, Hargittai suggests that ignorance was a vital ingredient in Watson’s DNA breakthrough, because if Watson had understood the limitations of X-ray crystallography at the time, he might never have tried to probe the molecule’s structure. On the other hand, Pauling was successful precisely because he was, in Hargittai’s words, a “walking data bank” of structural chemistry. For him, ignorance would have been disastrous. Similarly, Pauling benefited from competition, but for Yalow, life in a scientific backwater proved advantageous, as it meant that she and her chief collaborator “could work on problems of their own choosing and develop their work at their own pace”. Hargittai’s insights are not the type that would catapult him into a lucrative third career as a motivational speaker. But after the glib grandiosity of Innovation Generation, the limited conclusions offered in Drive and Curiosity feel both thoughtful and refreshingly honest.
- 2011 Prometheus Books £22.95/$26.00hb 328pp
A lot of silly ideas
The “Daedalus” column of scientific tomfoolery made its first appearance in New Scientist in the mid-1960s and was later a regular feature in Nature and the Guardian. To write it, author David Jones had to conjure up one silly-but-interesting idea every week for well over 30 years. He also performed regular scientific demonstrations on British and German regional television. That is an admirably long track record of innovative thinking, and fans of Jones’ Daedalian alter ego will be delighted to hear that he has now written an entire book about scientific creativity. The Aha! Moment is actually more like two books in one: its first chapters describe Jones’s theory of creative thought, while later ones give examples of his own creative ideas in action. Jones has undoubtedly had some very good ideas in his career, including an unrideable bicycle, a series of zero-gravity chemistry experiments that flew on the Space Shuttle and an artificial geyser made from a tea kettle, a glass tube and a metal bin lid. However, as he states on several occasions, at least 80% of all ideas turn out to be bad, and unfortunately there is some evidence for this in the book. The author’s less-great ideas include an eyebrow-raising division of creativity into allegedly “male” and “female” forms, the idea that a woman can subconsciously select which of her eggs will be released for fertilization and even suggestions that certain people can psychically influence the outcome of Schrödinger’s-cat-type experiments. True, some of these bad ideas are attributed to Daedalus, rather than to Jones himself, but it is sometimes hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. Those who never read Daedalus in his prime will struggle to understand why some of his jokes were funny, and will gain little from the book’s frequent references to Jones’s past work.
- 2012 Johns Hopkins University Press £13.00/$25.00pb 264pp p
