  Many organizations rely on the skills of innovative individuals to create
value, including academic and government institutions, think tanks, and
knowledge-based firms. Roughly speaking, workers in these fields can be divided
into two categories: specialists, who have a deep knowledge of a single area,
and generalists, who have knowledge in a wide variety of areas. In this paper,
I examine an individual's choice to be a specialist or generalist. My model
addresses two questions: first, under what conditions does it make sense for an
individual to acquire skills in multiple areas, and second, are the decisions
made by individuals optimal from an organizational perspective? I find that
when problems are single-dimensional, and disciplinary boundaries are open, all
workers will specialize. However, when there are barriers to working on
problems in other fields, then there is a tradeoff between the depth of the
specialist and the wider scope of problems the generalist has available. When
problems are simple, having a wide variety of problems makes it is rational to
be a generalist. As these problems become more difficult, though, depth wins
out over scope, and workers again tend to specialize. However, that decision is
not necessarily socially optimal--on a societal level, we would prefer that
some workers remain generalists.
