Your Industry’s Hardest Problem May Already Be Solved Somewhere Else

How to borrow a mechanism, discover where the resemblance breaks, and turn another field’s knowledge into an idea your own field can use.

When a team wanted to improve the handover of children from surgery to intensive care, part of its search led to Ferrari.

Researchers visited the Formula 1 team, watched practice pit stops, and discussed the work with its race director. Aviation specialists contributed, too. The resulting hospital protocol drew on ideas about coordinated roles, sequence, communication, and preparation. A small before-and-after study reported fewer technical errors and information omissions after the combined protocol was introduced. Read the original paper.

The striking part is the direction of the search. A hospital problem became partly intelligible through work performed in a different setting, for a different purpose, with different equipment.

That possibility should interest anyone trying to develop an original idea.

You may be treating your problem as unprecedented because the people who have solved something structurally similar use words you would never think to search.

A useful answer could already exist. The missing work may be recognizing the relationship, finding what transfers, and doing the adaptation that a memorable comparison tends to conceal.

The field name can hide the problem

Imagine a research consultancy whose teams repeatedly redo work that colleagues have already completed. This company is fictional; we will use it to make the reasoning inspectable.

The organization describes its problem as “knowledge management.” It buys a better search tool, encourages employees to upload reports, and asks project leaders to promote the internal library. Some things improve, but duplication continues.

The phrase knowledge management is a useful address within a profession. It is also a large box. It can contain several different failures.

Perhaps people cannot find previous work. Perhaps they find it but cannot tell whether it applies. Perhaps the report records the conclusion but omits the conditions that made it reasonable. Perhaps the result is outdated. Perhaps a colleague knows the answer but has no time or incentive to explain it.