Yesterday, I was helping a friend and colleague at ID work on an exciting new platform for eBooks delivered on a backlit display and was shocked and pleased with how easily I was able to provide feedback, give and receive ideas and inspiration. Not only was this (hopefully) helpful to Dan, but also to myself and my work with BettrAt and other little projects I’ve got going on.

I saw this article by Chip and Dan Heath and thought about cross-inspiration and finding analogs. Well said:

Most of us don’t solve problems this way. We start by tapping the local knowledge, and if it’s insufficient, we go looking for specialists. But what if we’re following the wrong protocol? We should stop looking for experts and start looking for analogues. It’s a big world: Chances are someone has solved your problem already. And she might be an anteater.

Why is it counterintuitive to look outside our own turf for answers? “If you’ve spent five or six years getting a PhD, or 5 to 10 years in the field itself, you’re a domain expert,” says Karim Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies innovation. “You can’t imagine that someone else may have a different perspective. But problems that are difficult in one domain may be trivial to solve from the perspective of a different domain.”

I don’t think it’s just about being cross-disciplinary. It really comes down to the individual, because people with similar backgrounds, training, and education, can still have really different perspectives.

It’s going to be fun to be an EIR at a VC firm someday. Until then, the march continues.