CommDigest

Innovators, practitioners and experts will tell you that often the best ideas in their respective fields are inspired by ideas, inventions or practices in other areas. In fact, a recent study showed that 70% of innovators get their best ideas from fields other than their own.¹ This will come as no surprise to business leaders who are familiar with the concept of “best practices.” But when it comes to searching for best practices related to collaboration and teaming, we too often hunt for inspiration in obvious places such as adjacent industries or direct competitors. Such shortsighted analysis ignores storehouses of potential benefit as it implicitly precludes learning from some of the world’s most famous and effective teams. Earth’s best teams not only belong to different industries, they belong to entirely different species.