I'm a researcher, professor, and human. I study the creative process in teams — how small groups of people generate new ideas, and then apply those new ideas to make the world better.
I believe that most good things in the world are the product of human creativity. If true, then it's important to understand and get better at navigating the creative process. I'm currently researching how teams innovate new medical devices; if you have thoughts on how to improve this process, I'd love to talk to you!
My noblest/happiest role is as a teacher. I aim to distill the best ideas/principles we have that explain how innovation and breakthroughs actually happen.
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About
I'm an Assistant Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Montana. I received my Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Eccles School of Business at The University of Utah. I research creativity and innovation in teams.
Research Interests
My research focuses on how individual resources like expertise and identity influence team processes and ultimately lead to new innovations such as medical devices and novel drug discoveries.
Teaching
I teach courses on organizational behavior, creativity, innovation, and decision making. I believe the most valuable thing I can do for students is help them learn to love knowledge acquisition for its own sake, raise their aspirations, and make unknown paths legible.
The best way to reach me is by email: tyler.talbot@umt.edu. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
Combinational Creativity
Cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, in her article "Creativity, where does it come from?", argues there are three types of creative "moves" we can make while thinking to generate new ideas: combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational creativity.
For creativity researchers, an idea has to be both new and useful (for something) to be considered creative. Boden adds the additional requirement that the idea should be surprising, which I love.
The first type of creative move we can make with our imagination is combinational: putting two or more existing elements together in a way that has not been done before. The key insight is that you are not creating new elements out of thin air (ex nihilo creation), but merely re-combining existing things into a new combination.
The concept of origami mixed with the concept of a microscope yields an inexpensive paper microscope called the Foldscope. The Foldscope, developed by Manu Prakash at Stanford, combines cardstock, a lens, and a small light-emitting diode. The microscope is durable enough to be thrown off a building and inexpensive enough to make microscopy available to students in low-resource environments.
The Reebok Pump shoe was born when the concept of a basketball shoe was combined with the concept of a hospital IV bag. Combining these two concepts, the shoe featured an inflatable bladder that could be filled with air by squeezing a small pump, tightly squeezing and supporting the ankle like a splint. Reebok Pump sales totalled over 1 billion dollars.
If taken seriously, one path to creating value in the world is spending time combining concepts or elements into combinations that are new, surprising, and valuable.
The Harvard economist Marty Weitzmann argued in a 1998 paper that this process of recombining old ideas is the basis of economic growth. The more existing concepts we have, the more new combinations are possible. There has never been a better time to find a new combination of existing concepts that solves a problem in the world.
Stay in the loop
I write occasional essays on creativity, teams, and the science of innovation. No spam, no fluff — just ideas worth thinking about.