AND THEY AREN'T MEETING AT MEETINGS:

Crossovers are what happen when an invention, idea, or body of knowledge in one field jumps into another -- and the result is a quantum leap of progress. Sometimes the people and the pieces we need to put together to get the job done come from the unlikeliest of places:

* The space suits worn by the Apollo astronauts were made not by aerospace contractor Hamilton Standard, as NASA originally intended, but by the seamstresses at ILC Dover, better known as Playtex. It turned out that knowing about couture, the art of constructing garments perfectly fitted to the body, was more important to helping humans survive the vacuum of space than the aerospace engineers initially understood.

* The first pacemaker was conceived not in a lab but at a chance meeting in a Cornell dining hall between two visiting cardiologists and an electrical engineering student. GPS was created over a long lunch at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

* Recent developments in medicine have come from computer games. In just three weeks, the players of Foldit, which simulates protein folding, deciphered a part of the molecular structure of HIV/AIDS that had eluded medical researchers for over a decade.

*By bringing the rhythms and attitude of hip-hop to a historical biography of Alexander Hamilton, composer, lyricist, and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda created a "crossover" moment in the form of Hamilton, the hit musical that won the 2016 Grammy award for Best Musical Theater Album.

The lesson: if you're not making room for the unexpected meeting of minds, you could be missing out on the next big breakthrough. 

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