When Dr. Charles Townes won the Nobel Prize in 1964 for his research that would become the laser, he ... [+]
"People sometimes ask me why we should devote so much time and energy to studying things which seemingly have no immediate practical applications. The answer, in my view, is curiosity. I strongly believe that scientific progress overall is driven by curiosity." Those words were shared with me by Dr. Reinhard Genzel, a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering a supermassive compact object (aka a black hole) at the center of our galaxy.
You're obviously familiar with lasers. With uses that include barcode readers, laser surgery, optical storage, LiDAR, holographic imaging, and a seemingly endless list of modern-day applications, it's hard to imagine a world without lasers (or a business presentation without a laser pointer). Yet when Dr. Genzel's mentor, Dr. Charles Townes, won the Nobel Prize in 1964 for his research that would become the laser, Dr. Townes wasn't thinking about any of those commercial applications.
Dr. Genzel told me that "People would ask Charlie why he built a laser; were you interested in the technical applications? And he would say 'No, no, no. What I was interested in at the time is to understand how molecules work.'" In fact, when asked by a Nobel interviewer what motivated his discovery, Dr. Townes replied, "I was especially interested in trying to generate some short wavelengths to do spectroscopy, in other words, the study of molecules and atoms. It was basic science I was interested in, I wasn't worried about applications and so on, and so I tried very hard to find new ways of producing radiation, particularly radiation as small as a fraction of a millimeter; I wanted to get to shorter wavelengths."
Not many people know that the National Science Foundation led the multi-agency Digital Library Initiative to index websites that funded Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Or that DARPA gave millions to SRI International to develop a cognitive assistant, technology that would later become Siri.
"Directed research is important, and it can be critical for immediate problems," Dr. Genzel shared with me. "But the ultimate innovations often happen because of some strange guys and girls who are curious about something and entertain themselves playing for a while. And then all of a sudden, bang, here it is."
Another Nobel Prize winner, William G. Kaelin Jr., echoed those thoughts in a recent conversation. The Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute told me, "Many of the recent breakthroughs I'm most excited about weren't initially foreseeable. But some scientist who was properly resourced, and given the time and trust to follow their curiosity and instincts, discovered something that turned out to be incredibly useful."
It's not a guarantee, of course, that if you give your employees more leeway to explore their curiosity, you'll have the next laser, Google, Siri, or whatever. However, a recent Leadership IQ study found that only 35% of employees say that they're Always learning something new at work. Meanwhile, 52% of employees are Never, Occasionally or Rarely learning new things. And as bad as that sounds, the reality is even worse: When someone is always learning new things at work, they are literally ten times more likely to be inspired to give their best effort at work.
There's a strong case for companies to support government investment in research so that we get more technologies like lasers, companies like Google, and applications like Siri. The government has the capacity to make longer-term, riskier, and potentially more innovative investments. But there's also a robust case for encouraging curiosity among employees at every company, big or small. People are happier when their minds are active, curious and learning. And if, like most companies, innovation is part of your corporate strategy, you'll need all the curiosity you can get.
