▶ Your Answer :
To make a significant contribution in any field of profession or academic field, both knowledge and imagination is necessary. Without basic knowledge on such a field, or without creative ideas, we cannot accomplish great achievements. However, when we are asked which of them is more important, it is debatable. Some argues that knowledge is more important than imagination, since getting necessary knowledge is very important first step to make a significant contribution. Nevertheless, in my opinion, imagination is more important than knowledge for extraordinary contribution in any field.
In the past, when it is hard to access necessary knowledge for accomplishing one's project or research, because of either lack of knowledge or lack of channels, someone who had more knowledge always made better results than others. In these days, however, thanks to a rapid development in storing and distributing information, knowledge became readily accessible to anyone who needs it. Nowadays, just having more knowledge than others do not guarantee his/her success. To make important contributions, one should come up with creative ideas on how to utilize the knowledge that are accessible to almost everyone in that field through various channels such as books, online search engine, etc. Given this change, it sounds absurd to say that knowledge is more important than imagination.
Furthermore, there are many examples where imagination played a lot of important roles than knowledge. When we think about famous geniuses, their contributions were not usually came from their knowledge. For example, Mozart's achievements was almost resulted from his creativity not from knowledge on musical composition. In addition, recently, a number of valuable research papers are written by those who are not experts in related fields. Many rocket scientists have developed innovative investment techniques, psychologists made significant contributions in behavioral economics. This trends reveal that even those who do not have much knowledge can be very successful when they know how to think differently and creatively.
In conclusion, even though, knowledge is a very important factor for achievements in many fields, it is not the most important one. Given that knowledge is a lot more readily accessible than the past, the importance of creativity and imagination is getting more and more important. |