Are Your Innovations Bold Enough? Here's A Quick Test Drawn From The Career Of A Nobel Prize Winner

If you took up bread making as a hobby during the pandemic, you know about baker's yeast. But you might not know that baker's yeast helps make a good portion of the world's insulin supply and the most common hepatitis B vaccine. This medical marvel is possible because a scientist had a bold idea that others thought was a bit crazy. And his example provides a guide as to just how bold your innovations and ideas should be.

You've undoubtedly had innovative ideas; maybe they were narrowly defined, like streamlining a process, or industry-shaking, like inventing a new product. Whatever the size and scope of your innovation, you've had innovative ideas. But were those innovations bold enough? Or, perhaps fearing disapproval or rejection, did you scale back the boldness and audacity of your innovations?

Here's a quick test to assess whether your bold ideas are actually bold enough: Do some people think you're a little crazy?

That's a strange test, to be sure, but it's grounded in the actual experiences of Dr. Randy Schekman, Nobel Laureate and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at UC Berkeley.

Dr. Schekman won the Nobel Prize for revealing how our cells regulate the transport and secretion of proteins. As he explains, "Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life. About 10 percent, on average, are specialized for export from the cell. They are packaged and encapsulated in vesicles, and they travel to the cell perimeter where they fuse to the cell membrane, which allows the proteins to be secreted to the cell exterior."

That doesn't sound crazy, but what might is that he made his discoveries using baker's yeast. As he shared with me in a recent conversation, "Most of the people at the time worked on cultured mammalian cells grown in the laboratory. Very few people were working on model systems of lower organisms like yeast."

As a newly-minted Berkeley professor in the 1970s, his decision to study yeast raised a few eyebrows, especially when his first grant application to the National Institutes of Health was rejected (and rejected with a wallop). "I had a lot of fanciful ideas," he told me, "but in the cold light of day, I was viewed as 'unworthy of risk.' My grant was completely trashed, and one regret I have is that I didn't save the comments I received. One of the comments was essentially that I was 'proposing to do things that haven't been done before, so how does he think he can succeed?' I thought, naively, it turns out, that was the whole point of this exercise." Even a former Dean at UC Berkeley said, "Everyone thought he was really crazy to study this problem by working on the genetics of yeast."

Even though more than a few people thought Dr. Schekman was a little crazy, and he admitted to me that he'd "never really suffered a blow like that," that crazy idea was the key to his discoveries. "It wasn't too expensive to work on yeast," he said, so he managed to cobble together enough funding to get started. Within a few years, he and his graduate student, Peter Novick, had significant discoveries and a major paper. And when Dr. Schekman was awarded the Nobel Prize, he shared that "when you look at the prize essay written by the Nobel committee explaining the award, that first big paper from 1979 is literally the first reference."

The biotech industry, and humanity in general, have benefited greatly from Dr. Schekman's discoveries, including, of course, providing a third of the world's insulin supply and the most common hepatitis B vaccine. But it's likely that Dr. Schekman wouldn't have made his discoveries without a level of boldness that earned him quizzical looks and even some "crazy" epithets.

Boldness, and even a dose of "that's crazy," seem to be an essential part of the innovator's personality. In a recent study, managers were asked to rate the characteristics associated with their most innovative employees. At the top of the list were characteristics like:

• Tries to do what others think is impossible
• Likes to be on the cutting-edge
• Swims upstream
• Is a risk-taker
• Is a nonconformist
• Doesn't know their own limits

"I think people are too conservative generally," Dr. Schekman shared with me. "Young scholars especially, who have the chance to uncork their minds and to take public funds to explore the natural world, should be bolder. They should try to solve new problems and not just add details to the old problems."

I can't promise that boldness won't engender rejections and disapproval; even Dr. Schekman admitted that "there will be some rough spots." But if true innovation is what you seek, a "that's crazy" level of boldness may be required.