Curiosity drives innovation

Curiosity drives innovation, which is an imperative in today’s economy. New York Times writer, Ben Greenman, highlighted what he calls ‘productive frustration’ as something the internet has quashed. Today we have access to so much information at our fingertips that we can satisfy our curiosity to know a specific fact in mere seconds. There’s no time to wonder, or to explore.

I worked on my PhD in the late 1990s. There was email and there was internet, but there was not the same rapid access to information that there is now. Some very recent research papers were available online, but most of what I needed was still in hard copy. To access research not held by my university’s library required a request to another library, quite often overseas. A paper, photocopied from the original, would arrive in my in-tray in a big yellow envelope, usually about six to eight weeks later. I had plenty of time to be curious about what it might say. In that time, I pondered the question more deeply, found other relevant research, and asked more questions.

I also had to analyse company annual reports, which I could not just download from their website, like you can today. As none of the companies I was researching were based in Australia, it required an overseas trip, to access the British Library, the London Business School, and other sources where these documents were kept. It made my research an adventure, not just an academic exercise, and it kept me curious.

Productive frustration, Greenman writes, allows questions to ‘ripen, via deferral, into genuine interests .’ Just as we don’t want ‘spoilers’ to tell us whodunnit when we’re reading a mystery novel, instant answers deny us the ‘pleasurable frustration of not knowing.’

Has rapid access to information diminished our ingenuity, or can it help us to harness it?

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