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Vive la Différence!

By Peter Lloyd

Why does the Boston Consulting Group advise its MBA-decorated clients with co-innovation experts who haven't earned MBAs--the degree once considered indispensable for business managers?

Why do MBA-bearing managers welcome these holders of non-business degrees into their external innovation network?

For the same reason Booz Allen & Hamilton recruits students pursuing non-business PhDs and more than half of McKinsey & Company's consultants lack an MBA. Cross-pollination.

Coming up with great, breakthrough ideas demands not just great quantities of ideas. The chances of blowing out the doors lies in collaboration with outsiders of the greatest possible diversity. The more diverse, the better.

If you keep going to the same well, you keep getting the same water> Which means you should build your external innovation community with creative people whose degrees, experience, and expertise do not mirror your own.

Besides, "If Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos didn't need and MBA, some people wonder why they do, either," writes David Leonhardt in the New York Times.

What's to wonder? Language was invented by illiterates. Music by people who had no training in music. James Burke in his monthly Scientific American column and PBS special, Connections, traced the world's greatest creative breakthroughs back through a history of chance as well as intentional clashes of diverse and unrelated ideas and events.

In her essay, "Carnatak Music and Hindustani Music a long history of cross-pollination," Shantha Benegal found the same borrowing and trading of ideas in the history of Indian music that nurtured Western music. She wrote, "One can only conclude then that music is a two-way street; actually a crossroads, where several influences constantly act, react, and interact."

Yesterday's two-way street has become a vast, global web of expertise ready to populate your internet-based innovation network.

Remember how the Beatles opened the eyes of the popular-music world when they fertilized their music with the rhythms and instruments of India as delivered by Ravi Shankar. Today music from anywhere in the world is a click away. The same open-door policy can drive your move to distributed innovation.

In short, the word foreign should be stricken from the vocabulary of any creative person who wants to make a difference.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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