[sdiy] Who Needs a Degree?

[David G. Dixon]

> You don't need a degree to build stuff that works. You do need experience
> to build stuff that works, and that experience is always a mix of hands-on
> and theory.
> 
> But you - usually - need a degree, or at least degree-level knowledge and
> insight, to *innovate*.
> 
> <snip>

Excellent response, Richard!  But, you left out probably the most important
ingredient for true innovation: luck.

I agree that deep insight is needed to come up with new stuff in any field,
and that a degree (and I'll commit myself here and say an "advanced" degree,
and by that I really mean a PhD) is almost always a prerequisite (but
absolutely not a guarantee!).  However, I can say from experience that one
almost never arrives at novel concepts in a linear fashion.  Typically,
these things are arrived at by one of the following routes:

1) Happy accident (i.e., discovery).  In my case, I've been researching
something fairly mundane, and an important innovation has "happened" as a
result.  My role has been to recognize the new thing as not only new, but
potentially important, and this requires broad knowledge of the field, in
terms of both theory and practice.  The last six years of my professional
career have been shaped by just such a discovery.  Now, of course, one could
argue that the original decision to study the mundane thing in the first
place already contained the seeds of innovation at a subconscious level.
Perhaps.

2) Additive synthesis.  This sort of innovation is almost always dictated by
need.  Someone comes to you with a problem, and you set about trying to
solve it by putting together various elements from your experience.  These
kinds of solutions always require a broad knowledge of ones field, and for
this an advanced degree and many years of subsequent experience are almost
always required.  Also, in my experience, even with an advanced degree, this
sort of synthesis seems to be possible only for a small subset of
individuals.  The rest are "plodders" who never seem to make the connections
necessary to synthesize disparate elements into a novel concept, but may be
very competent engineers or researchers nonetheless.  Innovators rely on
plodders to carry out their nefarious schemes.

I think that most (if not all) "big ideas" are arrived at by method 1.
Indeed, these discoveries often appear as "diamonds in the rough" and
require a fair bit of further innovation and refinement (often conducted
with an air of desperation) by method 2 to get them to the point where they
are reliably useful.