Yokoi was the first to admit it. “I don’t have any particular specialist skills,” he once said. “I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.” He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers. . . . Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere.”
He spread his philosophy as his team grew, and asked everyone to consider alternate uses for old technology. He realized that he had been fortunate to come to a playing card company rather than an established electronic toymaker with entrenched solutions, so his ideas were not thwarted because of his technical limitations. As the company grew, he worried that young engineers would be too concerned about looking stupid to share ideas for novel uses of old technology, so he began intentionally blurting out crazy ideas at meetings to set the tone. “Once a young person starts saying things like, ‘Well, it’s not really my place to say . . .’ then it’s all over,” he said.
Tragically, Yokoi died in a traffic accident in 1997. But his philosophy survived. In 2006, Nintendo’s president said that the Nintendo Wii was a direct outgrowth of Yokoi’s doctrine. “If I can speak without fear of being misunderstood,” the president explained, “I would like to say that Nintendo is not producing next-generation game consoles.” The Wii used extremely simple games and technology from a previous console, but motion-based controls were a literal game changer. Given its basic hardware, the Wii was criticized as not innovative. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen argued that it was actually the most important kind of innovation, an “empowering innovation”—one that creates both new customers and new jobs, like the rise of personal computers before it—because it brought video games to an entirely new (often older) audience. Nintendo “simply innovated in a different way,” Christensen and a colleague wrote. “It understood that the barrier to new consumers using video game systems was the complexity of game play, not the quality of existing graphics.” Queen Elizabeth II of England made headlines when she saw her grandson Prince William playing Wii Bowling and decided to get in on the action herself.
Yokoi’s greatest failure came when he departed from his own design tenets. One of his last Nintendo projects was the Virtual Boy, a gaming headset that employed experimental technology. It relied on a processor that produced high radio emissions, and before cell phones, no one knew if that was safe so close to a user’s head. A metal plate had to be constructed around the processor, which in turn made the unit too heavy to work as goggles. It was transformed into a device that sat on a table and required the user to assume an unnatural posture to see the screen. It was ahead of its time, but nobody bought it.
Yokoi’s greatest triumphs occurred when he thought laterally. He needed specialists, but his concern was that as companies grew and technology progressed, vertical-thinking hyperspecialists would continue to be valued but lateral-thinking generalists would not. “The shortcut [for a lack of ideas] is competition in the realm of computing power,” Yokoi explained. “When it comes to that . . . the screen manufacturers and expert graphics designers come out on top. Then Nintendo’s reason for existence disappears.” He felt that the lateral and vertical thinkers were best together, even in highly technical fields.
Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,” Dyson wrote in 2009. “They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.” As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, but contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.” Dyson’s concern was that science is increasingly overflowing with frogs, trained only in a narrow specialty and unable to change as science itself does. “This is a hazardous situation,” he warned, “for the young people and also for the future of science.”
Fortunately, it is possible, even today, even at the cutting edge, even in the most hyperspecialized specialties, to cultivate land where both birds and frogs can thrive.
* * *
• • •
Andy Ouderkirk laughed as he recalled the story. “It was with three gentlemen who owned the company, and I’ll just forever remember them holding up a vial and just looking at me and saying, ‘This is a breakthrough in glitter.’”
Standard glitter sparkles; this glitter blazed, as if the vial held a colony of magical prismatic fireflies. Ouderkirk envisioned a lot of applications for multilayer optical film, but glitter was a pleasant surprise. “Here I am, a physical chemist,” he told me. “I usually think of breakthroughs as being very sophisticated advanced technologies.”
Ouderkirk was an inventor at Minnesota-based 3M, one of twenty-eight “corporate scientists,” the highest title among the company’s sixty-five hundred scientists and engineers. The road to breakthrough glitter began when he endeavored to challenge the conception of a two-hundred-year-old principle of physics known as Brewster’s law, which had been interpreted to mean that no surface could reflect light near perfectly at every angle.
Ouderkirk wondered if layering many thin plastic surfaces on top of one another, each with distinct optical qualities, could create a film that custom-reflected and -refracted various wavelengths of light in all directions. A group of optics specialists he consulted assured him it could not be done, which was exactly what he wanted to hear. “If they say, ‘It’s a great idea, go for it, makes sense,’ what is the chance you’re the first person to come up with it? Precisely zero,” he told me.
In fact, he was certain it was physically possible. Mother Nature offered proof of concept. The iridescent blue morpho butterfly has no blue pigment whatsoever; its wings glow azure and sapphire from thin layers of scales that refract and reflect particular wavelengths of blue light. There were more pedestrian examples too. The plastic of a water bottle refracts light differently depending on the light’s angle. “Everybody knows this, that knows anything about polymers,” Ouderkirk said. “It’s in front of you literally every day. But nobody ever thought of making optical films out of this.”