Nobel Prize Winners and Creativity
Sara Beckman, Senior Lecturer
Business, Haas School
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2023 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2024.
This is a joint project with Autodesk (and its Innovation Genome project) and the Nobel Foundation. Autodesk has for the past few years been studying the 1000 greatest innovations in history to uncover common principles that lead to innovation. In this project, we will examine Nobel prize winners, particularly those from UC Berkeley, Stanford University and UCSF to understand how they came to the findings that led to winning the Nobel Prize. We seek to find commonalities and differences among them, and thus to inform future generations of innovation work.
Very little work has been done to date to understand how Nobel Prize winners think, and what creative processes they use to generate their ideas. We will start our work with background research on Nobel Prize winners, and then plan to conduct interviews with winners in the local area. We will take the data we collect from these primary and secondary sources, and will look for patterns of behaviors and thinking approaches that are shared across the prize winners.
If you would like an opportunity to get to know some Nobel prize winners well, this is the project for you!
Role: This is early-stage research, and so we seek URAP candidates who are comfortable with ambiguity and interested in exploration. We expect to engage in the following activities in the fall:
1)Literature review: We have already begun to review the small amount of literature on Nobel prize winners and creativity. We will complete that review this fall.
2) Nobel Prize winner background research: Before we conduct interviews in person with the prize winners, we will do some background research to learn about them -- their backgrounds, what they did to earn the prize, who they worked with, etc. We expect that students will be able to work in teams to do this work.
3) Interview Nobel Prize winners: Finally, we will create interview guides and deploy teams of URAPs to conduct interviews with the Nobel Prize winners, allowing us to dig more deeply into how they think, what they think allowed them to win.
Qualifications: All URAPs will be expected to be highly motivated, organized, and self-directed. Experience conducting ethnographic interviews and doing observation work would be great. Comfort with ambiguity, curiosity to explore, interest in learning about the lives and work of others.
Hours: to be negotiated
Social Sciences