Your new-age workforce

Some of the best ideas come out of what seems like left field.

Consider the phlebotomist at Sonora Quest Laboratories LLC who came up with an automated way to securely download patient billing information from hundreds of physicians' offices.

And if you're wearing invisible braces, you can thank two Stanford University MBA students, not an orthodontist, for designing them.
At Accenture, it was a project team's consumer packaged goods expert who figured out how one client -- a financial services company -- could best cross-sell products and services to its customers.

"Every project team we build has an entire spectrum of age and experience represented," says Accenture managing director Gary Curtis, who leads the company's 8,500-person technology consulting organization. The reason, he says, is simple: "Diversity guarantees the best project result and usually some layer of innovation."

The idea of populating a creative team with people from diverse disciplines isn't entirely new (Read how Computerworld's 2008 Best Places to Work in IT build diverse work teams). What is new and different is both the range and depth of team diversity required to succeed in an increasingly global economy and a world in which technology is advancing at warp speed.

Inventor extraordinaire Thomas Alva Edison is said to have hired experts from the railroad and telegraph industries and mixed them together with mechanical and chemical engineers at his laboratories in New Jersey and Florida in the late 1800s and early 1900s. When one of the experts couldn't solve a problem in his specialty area, Edison would assign it to another expert from a different discipline with an altogether different point of view.

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