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Setting the Stage:
Why Is Convergence Important?

Joseph DeSimone (Stanford University and Carbon, Inc.) began with a story about setting and upholding one’s stated goals. DeSimone recently restarted his academic lab and opened his first research group meeting by clearly displaying his group’s values. These values included commitments to multiple dimensions of diversity, which DeSimone considers a fundamental tenet of innovation. He explained that when you are clear about these values, you become a destination for people seeking to achieve excellence. By contrast, remaining silent about these values can quickly cause problems. DeSimone presented research as an expression of faith about the possibility of innovation, the possibility that “new things can be discovered, [and] that newer can be better.”¹ Academic research and, in DeSimone’s view, research-driven startups both constitute “a form of optimism about the human condition.”

Innovation was categorized by the economist Clay Christensen into three types: disruptive, sustaining, and efficiency. DeSimone explained that disruptive innovations transform the complex and expensive to make them affordable and accessible. A long-term investment, for example, may create completely new categories of science and sectors of industry such as the development of DNA sequencing and its evolution into the biotechnology industry. Disruptive innovations thus create millions of jobs. On the other hand, sustaining innovations do not create jobs, but they do preserve them by replacing old products with newly created components that improve

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¹ Rosovsky, H. (1991). The University: An Owner’s Manual. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

product quality and support a healthy economy. Efficiency innovations streamline processes and reduce costs, but they eliminate jobs. In the automotive industry, for example, automation and technology innovations have eliminated portions of the workforce. Considering each aspect of efficiency, DeSimone asked the workshop participants where they believe they stand on the spectrum of innovation types and where they would like to be.

DeSimone argued that innovation can be driven by convergence. He described a framework by Susan Hockfield and her team at MIT that sees the convergence of the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering as a strategy for driving innovation. DeSimone explained that an expansion toward a broader inclusivity of the disciplines (including the social sciences, humanities, and performing arts) could also be a blueprint for innovation. He offered the example of designing earthquake-proof buildings in Haiti. To complete such work, one would need to understand not only engineering but also French culture, language, history, and government policy. DeSimone further cited Apple and its former CEO Steve Jobs as an example of the inadequacy of any single field (technology, in this case). Jobs stated, “It’s technology married with liberal arts married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” DeSimone also warned that technology companies at times lack a liberal arts perspective. Facebook, for example, was intended to bring people together but has incited division, and Juul set out to end smoking, but its replacement—vaping—instead became a serious problem. DeSimone argued that perspectives from both the humanities and social sciences should be more deeply embedded in the goals and the operation of technological initiatives.

Convergence also impacts professional training. DeSimone used the model of I-, T-, and π-shaped people to exemplify this impact. I-shaped individuals have strong training in their core fields, T-shaped people are deeply knowledgeable about a particular subject but can also collaborate well with people in other fields, and π-shaped individuals are deeply knowledgeable about multiple subjects. This typology can also be described in terms of language: T-shaped individuals may work across distinct disciplines that share a common language, whereas those who are π-shaped are truly multilingual with a deep understanding of multiple subjects that use different conceptual vocabularies. While DeSimone views π-shaped knowledge as a higher calling, he expressed concern about the demands on people who develop multiple deep knowledge bases across their careers, and the extensive time that this process requires. Those in academic areas of research are thus significantly older than those in entrepreneurial spaces like Silicon Valley tech companies: the average age of a Research Project R01 grantee is around 40 years, compared to the average age of recipients of seed grants, who tend to be in their mid-twenties.

Beyond training and educational demands on multidisciplinary researchers, convergence also requires a level of vulnerability. To be an effective collaborator, you must be willing to clearly articulate the limits of your expertise—what you do not know as well as what you do—yet it is not common for organizations to reward scientists for being clear about what they do not know. It is important to create an environment that fosters this kind of clarity and allows for such learning without penalty.

DeSimone argued that social and intellectual diversity both constitute critical components of convergence and innovation. He began by reflecting on an invitation he received early in his career to join an innovation committee for a large European company. Upon first entering the company boardroom, he found that the committee was homogenous, composed entirely of white men who had all been trained in one of just two research groups. Despite his surface similarity to these members, DeSimone did not fit in and was not treated as a true part of the group. Instead, he was consistently cast as an outsider. In DeSimone’s view, the group’s lack of inclusivity put it at a structural disadvantage that hindered the fostering of the innovation for which it was formed.

This experience influenced DeSimone’s public commitment to inclusivity in his home institution and research group. He described a later invitation he received to deliver a keynote address to the American Chemical Society at a time when the NAACP was calling for a boycott of the state of South Carolina in response to its display of the Confederate flag. DeSimone’s research group decided to honor the boycott and withdraw from the conference. The bold stance to remain consistent with the group’s core value of inclusivity had consequences: the conference was relocated,² which attracted the attention of national news organizations covering the story. More recently, a personal essay in the prestigious journal Angewandte Chemie, International Edition expressed frustration with the professional focus on increasing diversity. The now deleted essay sparked a mass resignation by 16 of the 44 international advisory board members, including DeSimone, and has since rallied public support for the importance of building a culture of inclusivity.

DeSimone suggested that diversity promotes innovation when people of different backgrounds come together to learn from each other (in other words, when they participate in a form of cultural convergence). DeSimone stated, “We learn the most from those we have the least in common with,” both in disciplinary and cultural terms. DeSimone went on to describe the work of political scientist Scott Page about the power of diversity in

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² Brennan, M. (2000). Polymer workshop defers to NAACP boycott of South Carolina. Chemical & Engineering News Archive 78(10):58. doi:10.1021/cen-v078n010.p058.

problem solving. In his book The Difference,³ he shows that diversity does not always yield better results than ability, but it does so far more often than expected. DeSimone sought to quell the fears of those who may worry that diversity and inclusivity imply an end to meritocracy, clarifying that both ability and diversity matter. Teams require people who can successfully and skillfully play different functional roles. Team success also requires different viewpoints, cultural backgrounds, ethnicities, and genders.

DeSimone reminded the group that actualizing these important considerations requires resources, or as he put it, “a vision without resources is a hallucination.” He pointed to important differences in how resources are allocated in research and business settings by using Peter Thiel’s differentiation of “zero to one” ideas (or “rebel ideas” about which very few people agree) and “one to n” ideas (or ideas that build on those rebel ideas). DeSimone suggested that “zero to one” ideas face a difficult time securing traditional research funding, because an idea that few people agree with will not earn the broad support required for a traditional grant. An application submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must receive an “excellent” score from 10 reviewers to receive funding—if nine reviewers give it an “excellent” score and one scores it “very good,” it will not be funded—whereas in the venture capital world, one might receive nine “no” scores and only a single “yes,” but that is sufficient to secure an investment in a “zero to one” idea. De Simone emphasized the importance of “zero to one” ideas and of putting those ideas into action through translational research. In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Knowing is not enough: we must apply. Willing is not enough: we must do.”

DeSimone concluded by summarizing the key ingredients of innovation, which include diverse design teams, a commitment to mentorships and apprenticeships, efforts to behave differently than those in the majority of a field, a pursuit of connections between fields while building partnerships with domain experts, working performed on a massive scale rather than a merely incremental one, and engagement with others. These ingredients demonstrate the blend of convergence and diversity, which are interrelated and critically important.

DISCUSSION

Holbrook suggested that if diversity is necessary for convergence, then standardizing the meaning of convergence might end up interfering with convergence. DeSimone agreed with this characterization. He suggested that requests for applications may enforce standardization and expressed

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³ Page, S.E. (2007). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (2007). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt7sp9c.

hope that they might become less stringent and more interesting by allowing researchers to follow their own research interests.

Entwisle asked how DeSimone would define a field and thus measure when researchers are bridging fields. DeSimone suggested that fields are a lingering product of the 18th-century organizational structures still embedded in modern universities. He reiterated his views about I-, T-, and π-shaped individuals and the importance of promoting deep learning across multiple disciplines. DeSimone himself was warned early in his career to be careful of engaging in too many collaborative efforts because they may harm his potential for promotion. He personally received support from his department chair and suggested that all researchers should be able to receive funding as independent investigators early in their careers to promote the autonomy and latitude to think broadly.

Entwisle noted that the application of research for developing startups has been central to DeSimone’s career and thus asked whether he considers this work to be necessarily linked to convergence as a concept. DeSimone responded that it is not a necessary part of convergence but can be a defining element, in part because translational work is deeply inspiring. He further explained that startup development does not lend itself to every discipline, thus he would neither force that model onto a researcher nor negate those researchers who do link their work to business applications.

Peter Schiffer (Yale University) asked DeSimone to comment on the value of measuring the impacts and outcomes of past, present, and proposed convergent research. Entwisle suggested that this question probes whether researchers need to know in advance if research is convergent or transformational and whether convergence is a property of research itself. DeSimone said that convergence is valuable for social scientists to quantify but cautioned against prescribing how individual researchers should carry out their research. He argued that the national portfolio of research should be diverse. Not everyone should conduct research in the same way, and basic research is just one piece of that portfolio.

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