Creative Ideas Really Do Emerge More Often from the Periphery, Not the Core

Andy Grove, Former CEO of Intel

Do great ideas come from incumbents or from outsiders in a particular field?  Conventional wisdom says that outsiders usually introduce the boldest, most original innovations.  Is that true?  Lee Simmons recently wrote an article for Stanford Insights about the work of Paul Vicinanza, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer Srivastava.  The three scholars developed an incredibly large and diverse dataset, and then they used a deep learning model to examine the information.  They found that prescient ideas actually do come from outsiders more often than from those at the "core" of a field.  

The scholars examined over 100,000 quarterly earnings calls, more than 4 million judiciary rulings, and approximately 5 million speeches delivered in the U.S. Congress.   They used BERT, a deep learning model, to examine the texts.  The model rated each text based on the level of "prescience.  In other words, the speaker needed to not only offer an original idea, but it had to be an accurate prediction of what would come to be in the future.   Simmons reports on the scholars' findings: "The results were striking: In all three fields, they found that prescient ideas were much more likely to emerge from the periphery than the core. 'In studies of creativity, people tend to focus on brilliant individuals,' Goldberg says. 'But unless you think there are more geniuses on the margins, this suggests that where you sit matters at least as much as who you are.'" 

There it is... a person's position and perspective may matter just as much, if not more, than their particular knowledge or skillset.  You simply see things differently when you are the core of a field as opposed to the periphery.  Of course, that doesn't mean that you are doomed to not be innovative if you are an incumbent at the core of your industry or field.  You can take specific actions to move to the periphery, scan the external environment more broadly, and identify new ideas emerging at the margins of your domain.  Andy Grove used to say that, "snow melts at the periphery."  By that, he meant that new threats and opportunities often emerged first at the margins of an organization.  People at the core were often insulated from these new trends.  So, he encouraged his people to constantly get out to the periphery of his organization to spot and understand new trends.