Business & Innovation
At the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde, Dr Taylor studied entrepreneurs and self-organising groups: how people who specialise in different aspects of learning work effectively together, and what lets a group adapt rather than stall. This research was supported by a grant from the Cultural Evolution Society and the John Templeton Foundation.
Organisational adaptability and performance do not only depend only on the capabilities of individuals.
They emerge from the system those people form together. My research proposes that our brains evolved to specialise in different, complementary ways, and that our capacity to solve problems depends on those specialisations being combined through collaboration, in particular configurations. This has significant implications for how we design teams, innovate, and manage change.
Megginson, L. C. (1963). Lessons from Europe for American business. Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 44(1), 3–13.
“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
Dr Taylor works with organisations through talks, workshops and collaborations, exploring what Complementary Cognition changes about how we design teams, develop ideas and organise for adaptation.
Dr Taylor has been invited to speak about what Complementary Cognition means for organisations, with companies including Ernst & Young and Barclays and the World Economic Forum, and at institutions including Cambridge Judge Business School and Nottingham University Business School.
