7 ms·

Why innovators get better with age

97 points by mitmads 14y ago

mitmads 14y ago
"The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s" - What does this prove? Are they innovators? "But there is another reason to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves." - I don't fully agree with this. 'typically' is a broad word.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Well, that in particular proves that very, very few people are going to be trusted with a project that has a $100 or $200 million dollar budget when they're 25 and have no track record. Those are the movies that top the box office charts. I dunno that you can draw much of a conclusion from that.
  - mitmads 14y ago
    I agree with the fact that producers will not invest $100/$200 mn on a 25 year old. Thats the nature of the business. No connection with innovation.
swombat 14y ago
Very poorly argued points. There is no case made that innovators actually get better with age, nor indeed a decent definition of an innovator. Apparently, best-selling authors and directors are the best example of innovators that the author could come up with. Skip.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I don't know if they're poorly argued. I found the Nobel Prize statistics and the study from the Northwestern professor fairly compelling myself. (Link from the article: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/AgeAndGreatInvention.pdf http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/Ag...).
  - swombat 14y ago
    But, as pointed out by others, PhD/academia dynamics are heavily skewed by the fact that you have to do a PhD, then work as a postgrad for ages, before you get to run your own experiments. If you don't let anyone do anything but work on other people's experiments until they're 35, of course you won't get many great innovators below 30. If anything, the fact that the average age of academic innovators is 38 rather than 60 means that there is a large preponderance of innovations in those few years between 30 and 38, to balance out the fact that most academics in a position to innovate are older than 38. However, that's still using a fairly loose definition of innovator... arguably, people rewarded by Nobel prizes are not innovators, they're inventors. They've come up with something wholly new, and rightly deserve much credit for it. Innovators, however, are often those who take something new invented by someone else and actually bring it to the wider world. The classic example of an innovator is, of course, Steve Jobs - didn't invent any of the stuff Apple is known for, whether mp3 players, smart phones, tablets, or even the original Apple II (invented by Woz), but damn was he good at getting it market-ready and then getting people to know about it.
- michaelwww 14y ago
  I trust you will learn with age not to be make dismissive claims about an article you didn't finish reading.
  - swombat 14y ago
    I read the whole article. My conclusion was that it was weak. But thank you for the condescending comment.
    - michaelwww 14y ago
      Sorry. When I read he word "skip" I couldn't resist making the condescending older guy joke. I think the tension between the generations is good for us and keeps us on our toes. We could both learn a thing or two from each other.
EliRivers 14y ago
Doesn't every human activity with a large dependence on knowledge and experience get better with age?
- freyrs3 14y ago
  Begs the question whether doing meaningful work in a field will take more time given that it takes a decade or two to get up to speed with current research.
goldfeld 14y ago
I like the theme but indeed this article misses out on so many opportunities to make a good case. The innovators they are picturing are the "corporate innovators", which is different from the young kids disrupting markets altogether. The former are evolutionary, the latter really shine when they're revolutionary, which often needs a new company to take over instead of a big corp reiventing itself. But both are great drivers of human progress. If we only developed by leaps and bounds, revolutions, we'd be hard pressed to avance at all. I like the concept of slow hunches. These are the ideas that you breed in your head over years, decades. They often need to meet other slow hunches other people have been breeding to really shine. This is a slow innovation that startup culture completely misses out on. It's the foundation of scientific research, but it's also very much directly (albeit slowly) applicable to business. I have a few slow hunches of my own, which have been evolving over the last 5 years (I'm 23). They have spawned little ideas and projects already, but the main branches keep pivoting and growing because they're far from concrete yet to be even market tested or MVP-built. I feel my best innovation comes about from deliberate mixing of areas of knowledge. And it seems to me every week I have a new interest. I want to understand painting, poetry, design, writing, statistics, politics and a lot more. There's all this breadth I don't yet have, and I feel that's what makes good innovators, they're generalists, and criss-cross the DNA of different areas to create new mutations all the time. Most suck. In this sense, I'll be so much better at 50. It's also why I don't see myself calling software development my career in 20 years. I feel like I want to build a career that ages well, and though surely I'll be a better developer at 40, many market dynamics will be playing against me in the field of tech. If it's even relevant anymore in 2030. Maybe robot code-monkeys will do, at least CRUD and interface design, much better. I want to be a writer. I'm using article writing as a platform for all my expression and creativity. Want to understand something better? Write as best as I can about it, then edit, cut, edit. Like when it's said that you should always write all software as if it were open source (commenting, modularity, extensibility, docs), I write my thoughts as if they were published. I want to hone the craft, and eventually, as the decades pass, have a respected career for writing insightful articles where I wouldn't for writing old-man's code (Though I'm pretty sure I'll actually pay my bills with software still.)
- mooze 14y ago
  I have a whole bunch of these slow-moving projects - it's my modus operandi really. A recurring idea surfaces during mental downtime, is improved on, then dismissed. Repeat this until it has taken on a life of its own, then sit down and plough through the whole implementation stage in one sitting. It's hard to quantify or even explain properly, but it works for me. So for a certain type of creative endeavour, yes, more time = more potential for innovation.
rayiner 14y ago
I think the idea that the "true innovators" are a bunch of kids with no experience is massively counter-productive. If you look at the real innovators in computing (not Zuck) over the last 50 years, you'll see that the ripest period seems to be 30-40. Larry Ellison was 33 when he founded what became Oracle. Bradeen was 39 and Brattain 45 when they invented the transistor. Bill Hewlett and David Packard were 26 and 27 when they founded HP, but the company achieved its real successes during the war when they were in their 30's. The reason I say it's counter-productive is that it tends to upend a very fruitful social structure: younger people learning how to innovate under the direction older, experienced people. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie didn't invent Unix one day between their college classes. They joined Bell Labs after getting advanced degrees, worked on a system (Multics) implemented by older, more experienced people, and gained the expertise they needed to innovate. You can't really develop expertise as a young kid, and expertise is usually a pre-requisite for real innovation. And to tie in to the organizational management angle in the article: who would you rather have in your organization? John Carmack circa 1991 (when he founded id software), or John Carmack circa 2013? If this seems counter-intuitive in the context of the current Silicon Valley youth worship, ask yourself: what are the young kids at Twitter, Facebook, etc, really building? The answer is: lifestyle and entertainment products. Without demeaning the value of those products, I'll say it's not a contentious assertion that young people have some significant insight into lifestyle and entertainment as an industry, but that doesn't mean they're particularly innovative.
- mitmads 14y ago
  "expertise is usually a pre-requisite for real innovation". May Be. But many a times, being naive (and inexperienced) may make one to see and think differently.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    You rarely get serious innovation out of people who are naive and simply "think differently." As pointed out in the article, while Dirac and Einstein were outliers and making substantial contributions to science at 26, they both had persued extensive education leading up to that point. Are there people who innovate out of whole cloth? Maybe. I can't think of any offhand but I'm sure they exist. But they're not representative. Representative are people like Larry Ellison, who build an innovative company like Oracle (it was cutting edge in its time) by leveraging substantial industry experience and theoretical developments.
michaelwww 14y ago
The premise of the article is simple. Companies may lose money in the long run by cutting older workers and hiring younger workers in their place to save money. There's an obvious case to be made for experience and wisdom that comes with age to some older workers. A blanket policy of bias towards the young is going to lose that. Companies should be smarter about it and realize that some older workers do get better with age. They should try to hire boy wonders and keep some wise heads around. The author mentions a problem without naming it, which is the Peter Principle, where workers are promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer effective.
wilfra 14y ago
As a 32 year-old trying to break into Silicon Valley and feeling the strong effects of subtle (and no so sutble!) age discrimination, I found the headline and the hypothesis encouraging and really wish I could get behind it. However the evidence in this piece is lacking and unconvincing. He cherry picked a few examples of industries where people are required to pay their dues before the system allows them to make a contribution. In science one must earn a PhD as an ante into the game. Then they must earn a reputation and tenure before they are allowed to fully devote themselves to making major breakthroughs with their research. Early to mid 30's is roughly the age when one would be afforded that luxury, for the few who make it that far, so it makes perfect sense people would make their discoveries at 38. With film it's a similar story. Directors must first go to film school, then fetch coffee for directors, then work their way up the ranks on other peoples projects and then catch a series of extraordinary breaks before they are given the opportunity to direct other peoples ideas before they are finally given the freedom to truly do what they want. If they achieve that freedom by their 50's, they are one of the chosen few. Being an author works much the same way. Anybody with a text editor can write code that changes the World. So it's not the same. Does that mean young people are better at hacking than old people? No, not automatically. Nothing can be proven from all of these examples other than the relative barriers to entry in a given field.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I might just be missing something, but I don't really see the distinction between film, writing, and coding. Sure, there are power structures which expect certain things. But you can also ignore those power structures, and many people do. You can put code on github, or produce indie films. What's interesting is that even in that case people tend to be older in a number of fields. The film Primer, which was made on a $10,000 budget with no studio support, and is probably the best film about time-travel in existence, was made by Shane Carruth when he was 32— and not because he spent a decade going to film school or paying any other kinds of film-dues before that. With novels there is even less of a formal dues-paying apparatus. Nobody cares what degrees you have, and there is no way to move up in the ranks by spending 10 years making coffee for someone. Yet there are not many successful novelists in their 20s. Same with programming: you could be successful in your 20s, it's just uncommon.
trustfundbaby 14y ago
amazingly content free article. disappointing read.
mcartyem 14y ago
The word innovator might be ill-suited to support the argument that mastery generally takes time. For example physicists and mathematicians do their best work in their early twenties. Arguably they get worse with age.
- SatvikBeri 14y ago
  I was curious as to whether this was true, so to test it out, I looked at Hilbert's Problems[0], which are widely considered some of the most important problems in Mathematics in the 20th century. Of the solvers whose ages I could find on Wikipedia, the median age was 30.5 and the mean was 29.4. (For Hilbert's 10th problem the solution is listed as the joint work of 4 people. I treated them as one person with an average age of 42.5) This obviously isn't statistically significant, but it lends some weight to the myth that Mathematicians "die young."
  - mcartyem 14y ago
    This is great research, thank you.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    You see the effect in math because math requires the sharpest most complex pure thinking. Other major creative efforts (business, movies) involve collaboration and social/organizational structures that benefit from years of relationship-building and reputation-building. Or years of drudgery, if your innovation is something like the world's first dictionary.
muratmutlu 14y ago
I recently read another article on HN that said innovation got worse with age and responsibilities like kids etc, does anyone remember it? I think it depends on what industry you are in, but I have seen old guys build bad ideas too
robomartin 14y ago
One problem: What is innovation? Some innovation can and does happen from a position of almost complete ignorance. Other innovation requires years of study, domain experience and the benefits of a multi-disciplinary background. These are vastly different things. The former could be the domain of the younger crowd. The latter, almost by definition, belongs to those with more candles on their cake. Nothing wrong with either scenario.
icpmacdo 14y ago
These articles remind me of the the Malcom Gladwell book(outliers?) asking the question if this is because of all just genius or right idea right time
auggierose 14y ago
I totally agree, I am 37 now and within the next two years will change programming and math forever. :-)

97 points by mitmads 14y ago

"The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s" - What does this prove? Are they innovators? "But there is another reason to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves." - I don't fully agree with this. 'typically' is a broad word.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
Well, that in particular proves that very, very few people are going to be trusted with a project that has a $100 or $200 million dollar budget when they're 25 and have no track record. Those are the movies that top the box office charts. I dunno that you can draw much of a conclusion from that.
- mitmads 14y ago
  I agree with the fact that producers will not invest $100/$200 mn on a 25 year old. Thats the nature of the business. No connection with innovation.

swombat 14y ago

Very poorly argued points. There is no case made that innovators actually get better with age, nor indeed a decent definition of an innovator. Apparently, best-selling authors and directors are the best example of innovators that the author could come up with. Skip.

rayiner 14y ago
I don't know if they're poorly argued. I found the Nobel Prize statistics and the study from the Northwestern professor fairly compelling myself. (Link from the article: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/AgeAndGreatInvention.pdf http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/Ag...).
- swombat 14y ago
  But, as pointed out by others, PhD/academia dynamics are heavily skewed by the fact that you have to do a PhD, then work as a postgrad for ages, before you get to run your own experiments. If you don't let anyone do anything but work on other people's experiments until they're 35, of course you won't get many great innovators below 30. If anything, the fact that the average age of academic innovators is 38 rather than 60 means that there is a large preponderance of innovations in those few years between 30 and 38, to balance out the fact that most academics in a position to innovate are older than 38. However, that's still using a fairly loose definition of innovator... arguably, people rewarded by Nobel prizes are not innovators, they're inventors. They've come up with something wholly new, and rightly deserve much credit for it. Innovators, however, are often those who take something new invented by someone else and actually bring it to the wider world. The classic example of an innovator is, of course, Steve Jobs - didn't invent any of the stuff Apple is known for, whether mp3 players, smart phones, tablets, or even the original Apple II (invented by Woz), but damn was he good at getting it market-ready and then getting people to know about it.
michaelwww 14y ago
I trust you will learn with age not to be make dismissive claims about an article you didn't finish reading.
- swombat 14y ago
  I read the whole article. My conclusion was that it was weak. But thank you for the condescending comment.
  - michaelwww 14y ago
    Sorry. When I read he word "skip" I couldn't resist making the condescending older guy joke. I think the tension between the generations is good for us and keeps us on our toes. We could both learn a thing or two from each other.

EliRivers 14y ago

Doesn't every human activity with a large dependence on knowledge and experience get better with age?

freyrs3 14y ago
Begs the question whether doing meaningful work in a field will take more time given that it takes a decade or two to get up to speed with current research.

goldfeld 14y ago

I like the theme but indeed this article misses out on so many opportunities to make a good case. The innovators they are picturing are the "corporate innovators", which is different from the young kids disrupting markets altogether. The former are evolutionary, the latter really shine when they're revolutionary, which often needs a new company to take over instead of a big corp reiventing itself. But both are great drivers of human progress. If we only developed by leaps and bounds, revolutions, we'd be hard pressed to avance at all. I like the concept of slow hunches. These are the ideas that you breed in your head over years, decades. They often need to meet other slow hunches other people have been breeding to really shine. This is a slow innovation that startup culture completely misses out on. It's the foundation of scientific research, but it's also very much directly (albeit slowly) applicable to business. I have a few slow hunches of my own, which have been evolving over the last 5 years (I'm 23). They have spawned little ideas and projects already, but the main branches keep pivoting and growing because they're far from concrete yet to be even market tested or MVP-built. I feel my best innovation comes about from deliberate mixing of areas of knowledge. And it seems to me every week I have a new interest. I want to understand painting, poetry, design, writing, statistics, politics and a lot more. There's all this breadth I don't yet have, and I feel that's what makes good innovators, they're generalists, and criss-cross the DNA of different areas to create new mutations all the time. Most suck. In this sense, I'll be so much better at 50. It's also why I don't see myself calling software development my career in 20 years. I feel like I want to build a career that ages well, and though surely I'll be a better developer at 40, many market dynamics will be playing against me in the field of tech. If it's even relevant anymore in 2030. Maybe robot code-monkeys will do, at least CRUD and interface design, much better. I want to be a writer. I'm using article writing as a platform for all my expression and creativity. Want to understand something better? Write as best as I can about it, then edit, cut, edit. Like when it's said that you should always write all software as if it were open source (commenting, modularity, extensibility, docs), I write my thoughts as if they were published. I want to hone the craft, and eventually, as the decades pass, have a respected career for writing insightful articles where I wouldn't for writing old-man's code (Though I'm pretty sure I'll actually pay my bills with software still.)

mooze 14y ago
I have a whole bunch of these slow-moving projects - it's my modus operandi really. A recurring idea surfaces during mental downtime, is improved on, then dismissed. Repeat this until it has taken on a life of its own, then sit down and plough through the whole implementation stage in one sitting. It's hard to quantify or even explain properly, but it works for me. So for a certain type of creative endeavour, yes, more time = more potential for innovation.

rayiner 14y ago

I think the idea that the "true innovators" are a bunch of kids with no experience is massively counter-productive. If you look at the real innovators in computing (not Zuck) over the last 50 years, you'll see that the ripest period seems to be 30-40. Larry Ellison was 33 when he founded what became Oracle. Bradeen was 39 and Brattain 45 when they invented the transistor. Bill Hewlett and David Packard were 26 and 27 when they founded HP, but the company achieved its real successes during the war when they were in their 30's. The reason I say it's counter-productive is that it tends to upend a very fruitful social structure: younger people learning how to innovate under the direction older, experienced people. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie didn't invent Unix one day between their college classes. They joined Bell Labs after getting advanced degrees, worked on a system (Multics) implemented by older, more experienced people, and gained the expertise they needed to innovate. You can't really develop expertise as a young kid, and expertise is usually a pre-requisite for real innovation. And to tie in to the organizational management angle in the article: who would you rather have in your organization? John Carmack circa 1991 (when he founded id software), or John Carmack circa 2013? If this seems counter-intuitive in the context of the current Silicon Valley youth worship, ask yourself: what are the young kids at Twitter, Facebook, etc, really building? The answer is: lifestyle and entertainment products. Without demeaning the value of those products, I'll say it's not a contentious assertion that young people have some significant insight into lifestyle and entertainment as an industry, but that doesn't mean they're particularly innovative.

mitmads 14y ago
"expertise is usually a pre-requisite for real innovation". May Be. But many a times, being naive (and inexperienced) may make one to see and think differently.
- rayiner 14y ago
  You rarely get serious innovation out of people who are naive and simply "think differently." As pointed out in the article, while Dirac and Einstein were outliers and making substantial contributions to science at 26, they both had persued extensive education leading up to that point. Are there people who innovate out of whole cloth? Maybe. I can't think of any offhand but I'm sure they exist. But they're not representative. Representative are people like Larry Ellison, who build an innovative company like Oracle (it was cutting edge in its time) by leveraging substantial industry experience and theoretical developments.

michaelwww 14y ago

The premise of the article is simple. Companies may lose money in the long run by cutting older workers and hiring younger workers in their place to save money. There's an obvious case to be made for experience and wisdom that comes with age to some older workers. A blanket policy of bias towards the young is going to lose that. Companies should be smarter about it and realize that some older workers do get better with age. They should try to hire boy wonders and keep some wise heads around. The author mentions a problem without naming it, which is the Peter Principle, where workers are promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer effective.

wilfra 14y ago

As a 32 year-old trying to break into Silicon Valley and feeling the strong effects of subtle (and no so sutble!) age discrimination, I found the headline and the hypothesis encouraging and really wish I could get behind it. However the evidence in this piece is lacking and unconvincing. He cherry picked a few examples of industries where people are required to pay their dues before the system allows them to make a contribution. In science one must earn a PhD as an ante into the game. Then they must earn a reputation and tenure before they are allowed to fully devote themselves to making major breakthroughs with their research. Early to mid 30's is roughly the age when one would be afforded that luxury, for the few who make it that far, so it makes perfect sense people would make their discoveries at 38. With film it's a similar story. Directors must first go to film school, then fetch coffee for directors, then work their way up the ranks on other peoples projects and then catch a series of extraordinary breaks before they are given the opportunity to direct other peoples ideas before they are finally given the freedom to truly do what they want. If they achieve that freedom by their 50's, they are one of the chosen few. Being an author works much the same way. Anybody with a text editor can write code that changes the World. So it's not the same. Does that mean young people are better at hacking than old people? No, not automatically. Nothing can be proven from all of these examples other than the relative barriers to entry in a given field.

_delirium 14y ago
I might just be missing something, but I don't really see the distinction between film, writing, and coding. Sure, there are power structures which expect certain things. But you can also ignore those power structures, and many people do. You can put code on github, or produce indie films. What's interesting is that even in that case people tend to be older in a number of fields. The film Primer, which was made on a $10,000 budget with no studio support, and is probably the best film about time-travel in existence, was made by Shane Carruth when he was 32— and not because he spent a decade going to film school or paying any other kinds of film-dues before that. With novels there is even less of a formal dues-paying apparatus. Nobody cares what degrees you have, and there is no way to move up in the ranks by spending 10 years making coffee for someone. Yet there are not many successful novelists in their 20s. Same with programming: you could be successful in your 20s, it's just uncommon.

trustfundbaby 14y ago

amazingly content free article. disappointing read.

mcartyem 14y ago

The word innovator might be ill-suited to support the argument that mastery generally takes time. For example physicists and mathematicians do their best work in their early twenties. Arguably they get worse with age.

SatvikBeri 14y ago
I was curious as to whether this was true, so to test it out, I looked at Hilbert's Problems[0], which are widely considered some of the most important problems in Mathematics in the 20th century. Of the solvers whose ages I could find on Wikipedia, the median age was 30.5 and the mean was 29.4. (For Hilbert's 10th problem the solution is listed as the joint work of 4 people. I treated them as one person with an average age of 42.5) This obviously isn't statistically significant, but it lends some weight to the myth that Mathematicians "die young."
- mcartyem 14y ago
  This is great research, thank you.
- Evbn 14y ago
  You see the effect in math because math requires the sharpest most complex pure thinking. Other major creative efforts (business, movies) involve collaboration and social/organizational structures that benefit from years of relationship-building and reputation-building. Or years of drudgery, if your innovation is something like the world's first dictionary.

muratmutlu 14y ago

I recently read another article on HN that said innovation got worse with age and responsibilities like kids etc, does anyone remember it? I think it depends on what industry you are in, but I have seen old guys build bad ideas too

robomartin 14y ago

One problem: What is innovation? Some innovation can and does happen from a position of almost complete ignorance. Other innovation requires years of study, domain experience and the benefits of a multi-disciplinary background. These are vastly different things. The former could be the domain of the younger crowd. The latter, almost by definition, belongs to those with more candles on their cake. Nothing wrong with either scenario.

icpmacdo 14y ago

These articles remind me of the the Malcom Gladwell book(outliers?) asking the question if this is because of all just genius or right idea right time

auggierose 14y ago

I totally agree, I am 37 now and within the next two years will change programming and math forever. :-)