Making the Team: A Guide for Managers, Fifth Edition

Chapter 9 Creativity

Mastering Strategies for High Performance

In 2011, a group of biochemistry scientists and researchers at the University of Washington developed an online game called “foldit,” which embodied a protein problem that had stumped the biochemistry community for over a decade. For years, solving protein structures remained one of the most challenging problems in science. Unfortunately, even the most advanced computers couldn’t predict the structures of such large proteins, because there were simply too many possibilities. In an out-of-the-box fashion, the UW researchers invited nonscientist gamers to play foldit, and within 3 weeks, the gamers came up with an accurate model of the protease molecule, guided primarily by intuition. ...