Innovation Inspiration

I just came back from a talk at Dolby that was supposed to be on Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA), a topic on which I’ve spoken and that is the basis for some of the research I’ve started at the research center where I work. Unfortunately, the talk really had nothing to do with ASA despite the talk’s title, abstract and proclamations by the speaker.

My initial reaction after the talk was one of disappointment—where the #$% was information on ASA that I came to hear? Afterwards, though, I realized that I was, perhaps, missing the big picture and that what I had just seen was an excellent example of a specific type of innovation.

The engineer who spoke is an expert on such topics as low bit-rate coding (e.g., MP3) and other technologies of interest for Dolby. He has no expertise in psychology, the field in which ASA resides, but he clearly drew inspiration from ASA to develop new ideas in his own field. Simply put, an audio engineer read a psychology book that spurred new ideas for innovations in his audio engineering work.

Exposing yourself to innovative thinking in other fields is a great way generate inspiration for innovations in your own field. I’m not talking about simply taking ideas from other industries and implementing them in your own (although that could be considered innovative). I’m referring to learning about problems and solutions in other fields—different approaches and ways of thinking that haven’t been applied in your own area—and letting your creativity take hold. Let those ideas inspire you in some way to develop new ideas of your own, even if those new ideas have only the faintest resemblance to their inspiration. Christian Sarkar alludes to this concept in his post on building innovation ecosystems where he discusses how people need to be exposed to others with different perspectives and expertise in order to create breakthroughs.

The difficulty with this, of course, is finding the time to be exposed to ideas in different fields. Many people can barely find the time to keep up with advances in their own field, let alone be able to play tourist in other fields.

So, while what I heard tonight had nothing to do with ASA, without a doubt ASA inspired tonight’s speaker to create innovations in his own field, and those innovations I did hear about tonight.