[zoltaan]

Exactly! My best ideas come through exposure to broad topics of interests, synthesizing knowledge. Implementing approach from a different domain, seeing events in a movie that trigger an idea, reading about the ways living organisms optimise resources, etc. Not to mention social events on any subject when talking to professionals from other domains triggers solution to a long lasting problem. I also recall research on the positive overall benefits of turning our brain off/away/down for a while. ... Yet I also admit the need for highly specialized work-force too, some stages or activities require narrowly trained carthorsers where a creative mind would be just damaging a realization process. All depends on the situation.

Possibly the author is better off this position.

[JorgeGT]

> Not to mention social events on any subject when talking to professionals from other domains triggers solution to a long lasting problem.

This is becoming more and more important as science/technology keeps getting compartmentalized. Not to go as far as the medical doctor who rediscovered numerical integration [1], but I have the certainty that in my research I'm doing many things in a horribly inefficient way, out of ignorance. Just the other day I learned about k-d trees and sped up a piece of software in my lab by an order of magnitude...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1964613