June 22nd: The Creative Power of Collaboration

This article brings us back to our course focus on collaboration. We learned enormous amounts about collaboration during the first module, so I was excited to learn even more about the topic. I thought the example in this article about the Wright brothers was very interesting. This is a story I had learned long ago in history class growing up, but I never thought about this story in the perspective that this author puts it in. He states, "How did these two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, beat leading scientists, who had fortunes in funding, and win the international race to build the first airplane? The Wrights drew on the power of collaboration: they allowed their innovation to unfold from constant conversation and side-by-side work." This truly demonstrates the powerful difference between collaborative and individual work. All of the leading scientists who were trying to figure out how to build the first airplane were probably working on their own, with the hopes to be the only "winner." With collaboration, you get two brains of knowledge and perspective, and this example proves why it is almost always more beneficial.