David Galenson is an economic historian from the University of Chicago and talks about creativity during the opening session of the Skoll Forum (see here for my notes on the rest of the session with Muhamed Yunus, Queen Rania, Charles Handy and others). Galenson wrote a book called "Old masters and young geniuses". Economics, he says, has no theory of innovation, mostly because innovation is done by individuals and economists don't really study individuals. So, he invites the audience to consider director Clint Eastwood, who's in his 70s but has just made a masterpiece, "Letters from Iwo Jima", and won Academy Awards in the last twenty years. Or to consider sculptor Louis Bourgeois: "the sculptures he made after turning 80 are considered his most important work". Or writer (and Nobel prize for Literature) JM Coetzee, who didn't even start writing fiction until he was past 30. "These late bloomers are usually considered anomalies, but they are instead examples of a pattern which has produced some of the greatest advances of our civilization. We fail to recognize the link between innovation and experience". Since the Renaissance there has been this widespread assumption that great creativity is associated with early age. The word "genius" itself comes has its roots in the Greek word for "youth". And of course many precocious young artists have had a big impact. "But there is another, very different lifecycle of creativity, associated with artists that develop their art over a long period of time": Cézanne, Mondrian, Robert Frost, Bacon, Frank Lloyd-Wright, Dostojevski or, in earlier times, Goya, Rembrandt, and many more. These two patterns are the product of two different kinds of innovation:
- Young geniuses are conceptual innovators, they express ideas and emotions. Their innovation appears suddenly, as a new idea produces a result different from previous ones. Their talents are abstraction and a simplification of problems. They are mostly recognized and rewarded early in their life, which allows them to develop their art.
- Old masters are experimental innovators, they work by trial and error. Their work is to record their perceptions, they are uncertain on how to do this so their innovation appears gradually, piecemeal in their body of work. Their talents are real, concrete: they solve complex problems with gradually accumulated wisdom. They are often overlooked until they are older - which prevents some to develop their art.
Cézanne was an archetype of experimental innovator, his life was a lifelong quest to achieve a visual goal that he could never clearly articulate. "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" -- the cornerstone of cubism, picture left -- was instead painted by the revolutionary young iconic Picasso in early age. Picasso said: "when I paint I show what I have found, not what I'm looking at". Conceptual painters, from Raphael to Warhol, "planned their paintings meticulously in advance, to the point that they could have others actually realize them". Experimental artists such as Leonardo instead believed that the essence of creativity is in the process of creating the work. In literature, James Joyce was a conceptual, while Coetzee (who said "you write because you don't know what you want to say") and Virginia Woolf are experimental.
The problem is even more severe, says Galenson: this analysis is not unique to the arts. The idea of the two lifecycles of innovation came by studying sculpture, painting, music, literature. But this analysis is clearly relevant also to social entrepreneurship. The late Michael Young (see the speech by Geoff Mulgan) was probably the world's most prolific social entrepreneur, having founded about 50 organizations. His approach was that of essential humility. Galenson quotes Young: "introducing an innovation is an exercise of entrepreneurship, and for me this is best understood as concentrated kind of learning, continuous trial and error". Young reserved the right to change his mind as he went. Galenson discusses Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, who, in classic experimental terms, "let the poor teach him an entirely new economics" -- Yunus' GrameenBank is based on the principle that experience is the best guide.