08 Thematic Residency: Polymath Breakthrough

The Santa Fe Institute brings together physicists, biologists, business people, and social scientists to benefit from their collective and creative intelligence. Group idea sessions involving individuals with a variety of backgrounds have surfaced as a progressive ideal in creative industries. For example, the interdisciplinary Silicon Valley design firm IDEO invents products through collective brainstorming processes, often involving artists; similarly, former Microsoft chief researcher Nathan Myhrvold’s company Intellectual Ventures combines the inventive output of specialists with a variety of science and technology backgrounds to register hundreds of patents each year. Artists, however, rarely engage in this activity for their own benefit. The Banff Centre’s Polymath Breakthrough residency will combine a group of artists, paired with professionals from disciplines outside the arts, to experimentally work toward big ideas.

Lee Fleming’s article “Perfecting Cross-Pollination” in the September 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review addresses studies into the qualitative and quantitative aspects of group research and development: “When members of a team are cut from the same cloth (they’re all marketing professionals, for instance), the average value of their innovations will be relatively high. You don’t see many failures but you don’t see many extraordinary breakthroughs either. … As the team members’ fields become less and less similar, you see more failures but you also see occasional breakthroughs of an unusually high value.”

Inspired by this high-risk research approach, the residency will work together in a series of group discussions to address research topics specific to collaborations between artists and non-artists. Each artist in the residency will present a project, area of research, or collaboration with an individual or group outside the field of art. The collaborator(s) need not attend the residency, however a presentation will take place via live video chat connecting the remote non-arts collaborator(s) with the participants in the residency. This presentation will be followed by a group discussion addressing the subject of research and exploring the methodologies used by the collaborators.

Polymath Breakthrough is designed for existing collaborative pairs or groups. Please summarize your affiliation with a non-arts professional and outline a collaborative research topic on a single page. Each participant must submit individual registration forms, but pairs/groups must submit all other materials related to the project to be explored in the residency in one package.

Photo above: Sal Randolph, 2008