Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common-Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psycho-therapy with traditional child-rearing techniques.
“A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”
Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers.
Excerpt from: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg