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Comment by mitmads | Hacker News Reader

"expertise is usually a pre-requisite for real innovation". May Be. But many a times, being naive (and inexperienced) may make one to see and think differently.

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You rarely get serious innovation out of people who are naive and simply "think differently." As pointed out in the article, while Dirac and Einstein were outliers and making substantial contributions to science at 26, they both had persued extensive education leading up to that point.

Are there people who innovate out of whole cloth? Maybe. I can't think of any offhand but I'm sure they exist. But they're not representative. Representative are people like Larry Ellison, who build an innovative company like Oracle (it was cutting edge in its time) by leveraging substantial industry experience and theoretical developments.

Cutting edge can be mildly innovative. Facebook is somewhat innovative in my scale; as far as I know they came up with the timeline and tagging people. But for me really innovative are Kickstarter, Twitter, StackOverflow. Companies that went blue ocean and literally created a new thing or changed culture in a significant way, because of a fundamental idea, and not simply critical mass (like Facebook.)

StackOverflow was a slightly bettor implementation of an old idea. GPS was innovative and game changing.

And GPS was based on work funded by the DoD - an organization not known to be a worshipper of youth, at least in their R&D corners.

"Representative" is a dangerous term to use when you're already talking about distant outliers.

Making lot's of money is not the same thing as innovation. Apple started as a somewhat naive computer kit company who's sales took off, but was far from a stable company. NeXT and Pixar where both more innovative, not to mention how much better run Apple was after Job's return.

I've read some articles in the past that argue the people who see and think differently (and create something new and great) are the people who enter the field with a background in another typically unrelated field. Like, I don't know, professional fly fishing and network security.

Or it might cause you to see the same things everyone before you saw, and not know the difference.

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