Business scholars Karim Lakhani and Lars Bo Jeppesen studied Innocentive, the service that helps connect companies that have a problem or technical challenge with ideas and solutions that anyone in the world can offer. Their research found that when a company posts a highly complex problem, they are not typically solved by professionals in the discipline in question, but rather by what they describe as a “borderline expert” – someone with knowledge of the field in question, but whose expertise lies in an adjacent field. The second marker of success involved individuals who have “interdisciplinary expertise” – the ability to draw connections between one subject and another. One of the scholars opined, “You have to be close enough to comprehend the technical aspects, but not so close that you’re biased by the way those immersed in the problem tend to think.” (The Atlantic)

This research suggests some takeaways for decision making, human-resources planning and staffing.  There are benefits to hiring people with non-traditional backgrounds for work in a related field. Diversity of a person’s professional experience can offer a broader range of insights and ways of approaching a problem. Changing a person’s area of focus and analysis can broaden his or her ability to make connections and gain insights. Companies should avoid having staff operate in siloes of expertise among colleagues who share a similar expertise.

In a recent real-world example, a team of researchers in Boston and Japan have discovered something other scientists are calling “shocking,” “astounding,” “revolutionary,” and “almost like alchemy” – a reference to the ancient belief that lead could be transformed into gold: Researchers learned that by dipping mature adult cells into a bath of acid for half an hour, the cells will transform on their own into stem cells. Currently, the art of creating such induced pluripotential stem cells or iPS cells, involves a series of highly technical steps with the use of specialized drugs. (Boston Globe)

This discovery could be a transformational landmark in the application of stem cell research, which has spent years looking for approaches to offer stem cell therapies that do not involve creating or destroying embryos. What is also significant, as noted by the Boston Globe, is that “the approach is so simple and so out-of-the-box that it might never have been tried if it hadn’t been for the persistence and curiosity of Dr. Charles Vacanti, an anesthesiologist working largely outside the field of stem cell science” [emphasis added].

Consider that Dr. Vacanti works in an adjacent field to stem-cell research but is not considered an expert therein, not dissimilar from the most successful researchers found in the study on Innocentive.

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We are slowly but steadily increasing our understanding that many of the maladies being suffered by children (and adults) are of our own making. In these kinds of areas, will knowledge be sufficient to change behavior?  Will public officials or regulators get involved?

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Between 30 and 40 percent of everyday conversation consists of people talking about themselves.  For online social media, that figure jumps to 80 percent.  Evidently, without our counterparts in personal, real-world conversation being able to roll their eyes, groan or even say “stop” (in various ways, both polite and not-so-polite), we humans will just talk on and on about ourselves, a reality that has led to more than 1 billion people on Facebook, constantly updating what they have to say about themselves, and to Pinterest “pins,” providing users a way to visually “talk” about themselves.

A recent Harvard study revealed that sharing any information with others triggers a pleasurable neurochemical reaction in the brain but that sharing with others information about the self triggers an even larger shot of the neurochemical dopamine.  For some time, scientists have known that such a physiological shot of pleasure accompanied winning food and having sex and that similar effects came from acquiring money. But this was the first study to prove that the body was particularly pleased and therefore offered larger rewards for something researchers called “self-disclosure.” That certainly gives a vote of confidence for the “quantified self” movement, which encourages individuals to monitor their activities and vital signs and to share their data with others.

Meanwhile, other researchers have focused on what they call “addiction transfer.”  For instance, many patients who have undergone gastric bypass surgery to suppress eating and control obesity have subsequently become addicted to something other than food, such as drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and the like.  Pursuing that curiosity, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Maryland have discovered that the body has specific receptors to control the release of dopamine.  Many people have fewer such receptors and thus are able to get addicted to activities that prompt the brain to unrelentingly release the neurochemical.  In other word, when denied access to one kind of addiction that triggers a dopamine fix, those short of the control receptor transfer to something else that can supply the pleasure shot.

And so, now that we know talking about ourselves can trigger the dopamine shot, researchers might have inadvertently discovered another kind of “talking cure,” the name typically applied to psychotherapy. The 80 percent of social-media conversations that focus on “self-disclosure” suggest that this new form of talking cure might be successful.   Is society really OK with a wild spread of social-media addiction?  Facebook stockholders certainly hope so.

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