The Greatest Innovation Hub in History Had a Secret. Most Companies Are Doing the Exact Opposite

Florence didn’t out-hire its rivals. It engineered the collisions the rest of Europe was busy preventing.

EXPERT OPINION BY TONY MARTIGNETTI

In 1418, the city of Florence had a 100-foot hole in the roof of its cathedral and no idea how to close it. The builders had started Santa Maria del Fiore more than a century earlier and left the hardest part for later, gambling that someone, eventually, would work out how to raise the largest dome since antiquity over an octagonal base, without the flying buttresses every other cathedral leaned on and without a scaffold tall enough to hold it up mid-construction. Later had arrived, and nobody could do it. The credentialed architects of the age, the men whose entire profession was buildings, were stumped. 

The man who solved it was a goldsmith 

Filippo Brunelleschi had no formal training in architecture or engineering. He had trained in metalwork, dabbled in clockmaking and gears, worked out the mathematics of linear perspective, and spent years in Rome obsessively measuring the ruins of the Pantheon. He was, by the standards of any org chart, catastrophically unfocused. And that scattered inheritance was precisely what let him see what........

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