Why Innovation Comes from the Edges

By Dorie Clark

Early in his career, iconoclastic scientist Eric Schadt gave a lecture at Columbia University. A tenured professor stood up during the middle of his talk. “‘I think nobody should continue listening to what this guy has to say,’” Schadt recalls. “He said he was going to leave, and everybody else should, too.”

That kind of vitriol is pretty common when you’re an innovator, I discovered in the course of researching my book Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It, which offers strategies to help entrepreneurs and other professionals become more innovative. Today, Schadt has published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles on everything from Alzheimer’s to diabetes.

But he became a lightning rod in his field because he was one of the first to apply the power of Big Data to biology. Having trained first in mathematics and computer science, he was comfortable with quantitative analysis in a way that most other biologists were not.

Many successful professionals are invested in the status quo that brought them to prominence. But when times change, new opportunities arise. If you’re willing to seek out new ideas and stare down the haters (like the Columbia professor so agitated by Schadt’s presentation), you can see connections and insights that are invisible to others.

Part of becoming an innovator is recognizing that all your previous experiences—your professional training, your innate skills, your upbringing, your hobbies—factor into how you see the world. Like Schadt, you can make your status as a newcomer an advantage, rather than a weakness. If you can study deeply enough to gain mastery, but still retain an outsider’s perspective and willingness to question assumptions, you can become great by writing your own rules.

In Schadt’s case, it took fifteen years for the ideas he and a small group of allies were advancing to become mainstream. But they’ve certainly arrived, earning him recognition as a top scientific researcher.

You might imagine that your passion for fantasy football, or your master’s degree in Italian literature, or your skill in juggling would be pretty irrelevant to your future success. But those skills may actually provide the perspective you need to understand the world just differently enough to make a contribution.

Some of the most significant ideas come about when someone sees a problem in a new way—often by combining disparate elements that initially seemed unrelated. That’s where your unique gifts come into play; no one has the exact same training and background as you do, so no one else can see a problem exactly the way you do. Bringing your whole self to the challenge—everything you’ve done and learned before—is what will allow you to combine ideas into exciting new forms.

If you want to innovate in your company or in your field, ask yourself how you can leverage your past training to bring a new perspective to your current endeavor, and whether the perspective of another field could shed light on the questions you’re working on. (I created a free companion tool - the 42-page Stand Out self-assessment workbook - to help you develop your own breakthrough ideas.)

As Schadt’s experience shows, initially, it’s harder to advance in a profession when you’re coming from outside. The resistance can be fierce, and sometimes it’s years before your ideas gain currency. Others will perceive your lack of experience in the discipline as a liability. But your outsider status and new perspective can enable you to see things others cannot – and that’s where true innovation comes from.

Dorie Clark is a keynote speaker, marketing strategist, and executive coach who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You, Entrepreneurial You, and Stand Out, which was named the #1 Leadership Book of the year by Inc. magazine. Download her free Stand Out self-assessment at dorieclark.com/join.