Lessons Learned From Outside Innovators
Outsiders can spark new thinking by challenging norms and spotting overlooked opportunities.
Taylor Callery
People from outside an organization can offer a unique perspective that challenges established norms and catalyzes innovation. But that won’t happen if these unconventional thinkers find themselves in an environment where insiders don’t value or support their input. Leaders can learn how to spot and advocate for these disrupters by understanding outsider advantages and disadvantages, the need for allies, and the power of diverse views in combatting groupthink.
In the theater of innovation, it is often the outsider who steals the spotlight. Consider Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian scientist who endured years of scorn for her theories about messenger RNA (mRNA). Eventually, her research became the cornerstone of rapid development work on a COVID-19 vaccine — and earned her and collaborator Drew Weissman the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Successful disrupters often start on the fringes, dismissed for their unconventional ideas or for pursuing paths others see as fruitless. But there is an upside to their outsider status: Unburdened by the ingrained norms and expectations that constrain insiders, they are uniquely positioned to connect disparate thoughts, see options that others have overlooked, and advance new perspectives that often have the potential of challenging, if not altering altogether, the status quo. Sociologists call this focused naivete — a productive ignorance of entrenched assumptions that enables outsiders to approach problems deemed trivial or unsolvable by experts.
Unfortunately, this freedom usually comes at a cost. The very distance that fuels outsiders’ innovative thinking can also hamper their quest for the backing and recognition needed to bring their ideas to fruition and share them with the world. Without traditional credentials, established networks, or experts’ stamp of approval, the outsider’s journey is often uphill: Along the path to the Nobel, Karikó was demoted and kicked out of her lab space at the University of Pennsylvania, and she was actively discouraged from pursuing work on mRNA. Eventually, in 2013, she joined BioNTech as a senior vice president, after the university denied her reinstatement to the faculty position that she had been demoted from nearly two decades earlier.
Karikó’s experience is emblematic of a broader paradox. As Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, aptly observed, “Great new things often come from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves.”1 This tension highlights the dual nature of outsider innovation: the ability to break free from conventional thinking while facing skepticism from those rooted in established norms.
References
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11. G. Kolata, “Long Overlooked, Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus,” The New York Times, April 8, 2021, updated Oct. 2, 2023.
12. L. Corbo, R. Corrado, and S. Ferriani, “Network Pathways of Peripheral Firm Entry: Empirical Evidence from the Global Airline Industry,” Research Policy 53, no. 4 (2024): 104960.
