How Not to Make a Catapult

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​With a soaring twenty-foot throwing arm, a hulking wooden frame, and three hundred pounds of sand hanging pendulously in its belly, our catapult made for an impressive school project. Mike and I had been working for weeks, but despite the machine’s fearsome appearance there was still plenty of work to be done. The latch that released the projectile was in particular giving us no end of trouble, alternately flinging its payload into the ground at our feet or sending us scampering for cover as potatoes and cantaloupes rained down from above. We put in countless afterschool afternoons and no small amount of engineering effort, but in the end were defeated. Where had we gone wrong? 

Let start by stepping back. Designers often talk about “Ah Ha” moments, where the problems that had been bedeviling them are suddenly resolved and a brilliant design makes itself known. Mine came a bit late, about twelve years late, after dozens of engineering courses, an undergraduate degree and a masters, and half of a PhD. It actually hit me last week, when I came across this picture in MAKE Magazine:

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What is Management, Anyway?

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In the grand scheme, the goal of academic research is to advance the state of human knowledge. While this necessarily entails diving into some fairly esoteric weeds, I won't pretend that management scholars have it too tough in that regard (at least compared to chemistry). At the same time, our field is somewhat unique in that few people know what it actually means to study management (at least beyond an MBA). For years, people have been asking "so, you're getting a PhD in how to make money?" That's a fair question, but pursuing a PhD isn't usually a ticket to fame and riches. Instead, academic research in management explores topics such as innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and strategy. And because you're now thinking, "those don't really sound like real scientific pursuits either," it's probably worth digging a bit deeper.

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Hey Crowd, Who's Feeling Clever?

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​Let's say you run a research lab, and you've got a really tough problem. I mean a real doozy - your best scientists have been working on it for years and they haven't been able to figure anything out. But you still need an answer, so how are you going to get one? Enter a new phenomenon: Open Innovation. You've probably heard of companies relying on the "wisdom of the crowds" for things like the latest Doritos ad campaigns, Threadless T-shirt designs, and the world's largest encyclopedia, but you may not know that firms are also turning to crowds with their really high-tech conundrums. A number of platforms have sprung up to connect problem seekers with problem solvers, of which Innocentive (founded 2001) is probably the most famous.

I'll go more into Open Innovation (and it's cousin, Crowdsourcing) in a later post, but the basic idea behind Innocentive is that companies can post problems and associated rewards on a website where individual scientists can sign up to view them. If someone thinks they might be able to answer a problem, they connect with the company and send in a solution. The company then determines the best solutions and gives (big) rewards to the solvers - up to the tune of $100,000. Keep in mind, though, these are complex research problems. Examples include designing an injectable suspension placebo with no pharmacological or biological activity, or synthesizing a food grade polymer delivery system. So then the big question: does it actually work? 

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Grab a Drink: It's Time to Get Creative

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What did Beethoven, Poe, Hemingway, and Jackson Pollock all have in common? First, they're considered to be among the most prolific and creative minds in history. Second, they all had more than a bit of a fondness for the drink. And that's probably not a surprise to many people: "altered cognitive processing", brought on by insanity, sleep state, or substance use, has long been linked to creativity in artists and problem solvers. But will grabbing a beer really help you or me tackle tasks more creatively? That's exactly what three researchers at the University of Illinois recently set out to test. Their paper, titled "Uncorking the Muse" and published earlier this year in the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition, has got to be one of the funnest studies ever printed. Here's the punchline: intoxicated individuals solved a test of creative problem solving more completely, and in less time, than their sober counterparts. They were also more likely to have confidence in the creativity of their solutions.

To test the effect of alcohol on creativity, the authors recruited a target sample of forty male social drinkers aged 21-30 through Craigslist and the University community. The subjects were "administered" a succession of Smirnoff vodka cranberries and shown the movie Ratatouille. Once they reached peak intoxication, the participants completed a battery of creative problem solving tasks known as the Remote Associates Test (RAT), while also undergoing occasional breathalyzer tests. The control subjects did the same routine, minus the Smirnoff.

Not only did the intoxicated subjects complete a greater portion of the RAT items, but they did so faster and more creatively. The underlying intuition is that alcohol reduces ones ability to mentally focus and control attention. Laser focus may help a lot on structured analytical tasks, but actually inhibits creativity by discouraging associational, divergent, and nonlinear thinking. By limiting the ability to keep one's thinking straight, alcohol can therefore encourage creativity. In this sense, it acts just like grogginess or sleep deprivation, as I discussed in an earlier post.

Now, this doesn't mean that getting smashed is going to make you more creative, but it does suggest that having a beer before your next project might not be a terrible idea. And hey, it's Friday.

Check out the paper here. Thanks to Brooking for the heads up!