Why Quirky Wins The Day

If you look at the greatest innovations of this world, it may surprise you to find deviant personalities and quirky innovators behind them. Melissa Schilling, Professor of Innovation and Strategy at New York University’s Stern School of Business, was inspired to do a multiple case study on serial breakthrough innovators. She didn’t actually try to set out and find unusual or quirky people to study, but ended up being pretty surprised that almost uniformly, they all had this strange social awkwardness or social detachment, a sense of separateness like they didn’t belong or they didn’t feel connected to the social world. One interesting truth is that none of the innovators she studied placed a high priority on money. The more she studied them and the more she connected what she knew about them up to what we knew about innovation and creativity, it all started coming together that this separation is actually a big part of what enabled them to break norms, to challenge conventional wisdom, and to pursue projects even in the face of criticism.