Beth: I completed agree with your point that exploration outside of the domain of your day job is a key ingredient to innovation.
There are some famous examples of this, like Steve Jobs “dropping in” to a typography class after formally dropping out of Reed College, creating a passion for typography that made its way into the computer industry years later.
I have an example from my own life, though I wouldn’t call it “useless knowledge.” I work for IBM as an engineer and a few years ago I joined the IBM Design group to partner with a senior designer on how we could get engineers and designers to have better collaborations, since we saw occasional adversarial, territorial relationships. The short version of what we learned was that the breakdown occurs from a lack of understanding and respect for the other discipline as well as focusing on ones’ own output (e.g. code) as the deliverable, vs. as a contributing component a customer outcome.
A few years later, a dear family member was diagnosed with breast cancer. To better support her, I intensely studied the topic of oncology, including reading the book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” In this book, the author describes how several different schools of treatment appeared over time: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, and genetic therapy. It turns out that these schools of treatment experienced their own problems with tribalism and not-invented-here in the initial decades of their appearance.
The happy ending is that over the course of time, oncology adopted a multi-disciplinary approach where a team of doctors come up with a wholistic treatment plan, where the different schools play a tailored role based on the nature of the cancer, and the evaluation of the patient. It gives me hope and concrete ideas on how the field of software-centric product design, we will mature as an industry so that we each respect and understand the contributions of adjacent disciplines, and come up with standard collaboration patterns similar to what oncology has adopted.
This both supports your premise in the sense of learning from an outside domain (for me oncology) as well as pointing towards a healthier, more robust interdisciplinary approach that should help more innovation through the cross-pollination of diverse expertise and perspectives.
