More experience = less innovation?

Professor Gunther Schuh from the Technical University of Aachen is the founder of a factory for electric vehicles, which developed, among other things, the electric cars for the postal service. In the first year, Schuh says, he only had people on the team who had never developed production cars before. He didn’t want someone with decades of experience popping in all the time and telling him what can and can’t be done. So is experience bad for innovation?

Most research shows that, as you would expect, experience bolsters team performance. Nor is it age in general that holds back innovation: there is no correlation between age and team performance. Team performance depends primarily on task-specific knowledge rather than general industry experience. Even more important than knowledge is knowledge transfer, i.e. the willingness and ability to share knowledge and experience.
 

Thus, experience-based knowledge only becomes an “experience trap” if one assumes that experiences once made are transferable everywhere and at any time.

If you want to create something new, you should use experience as an accelerator and not as a brake: bring in a lot of ideas and expertise at the beginning but little experience. Then gradually increase the proportion of experienced people when it comes to concrete planning and implementation. One should not confuse age and seniority with experience: young people can be very experienced, and older people can be very curious and innovative.