Coco Chanel, Steve Jobs, and Katalin Karikó were outsiders who defied the odds and produced revolutionary innovations. How do such outsiders succeed when so many others fail? The authors’ research uncovered four factors: (1) The outsiders were not outliers; they belonged to the system but hadn’t lost touch with its fringes. (2) An outsider had at least one insider who was willing to vouch for his or her ideas or abilities. (3) Outsiders leveraged “fracture points” — such as the death of a major gatekeeper. (4) Instead of just viewing their innovation as a technical challenge, they see it as a marketing challenge.
Every once in a while, an outsider comes along with a new vision or a new way of doing things that revolutionizes a scientific field, an industry, or a culture. Take the case of Katalin Karikó, who defied all odds to pioneer the mRNA technology that ultimately gave the world Covid-19 vaccines in record time. Daughter of a butcher and raised in a small adobe house in the former Eastern bloc with no running water or refrigerator, Karikó started working with RNA as a student in Hungary but moved to the United States in her late twenties. For decades, she faced rejection after rejection, the scorn of colleagues, and even the threat of deportation. Yet today, Karikó’s foundational work on mRNA is at the heart of the vaccines developed by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, and many researchers are now calling for Karikó to win the Nobel Prize.
How did that happen? After 10 years of research, relying on a mix of qualitative techniques, large dataset analysis, and historical research, we have come up with four factors that explain the success of outsiders like Karikó. These factors do not have to be concomitant, and none is necessary, but each increases the odds substantially that an outsider will break through and their innovation will have a major impact.
1. Outsiders are not outliers.
Our research suggests that successes like Karikó’s occur not just despite outsider status but because of it. Being less tied to the norms and standards to which insiders conform, outsiders recognize solutions that escape incumbents’ attention. Yet, the paradox is that the same social position that gives outsiders the perspective to pursue imaginative projects also constrains their ability to obtain support and recognition for their innovations. How do the innovations of outsiders like Karikó gain traction?
The innovation pattern we observed in our research is very consistent. Outsiders typically innovate by acting on insights and experiences that are new to the context they enter but familiar to the context they come from. Consider Coco Chanel, the illegitimate daughter of a laundress and a street peddler. Abandoned and raised by nuns in an orphanage, she found in this humble context original inspiration for some of her most iconic design concepts. For example, her proverbial predilection for black and white is generally attributed to her prolonged exposure to the colors of the orphanage uniforms and the nuns’ tunics. Even the distinctive Chanel logo was an idea she gleaned from a simple stained-glass window of her orphanage, the Abbey of Aubazine.
You would think that successful outsiders like Karikó and Chanel are statistical outliers, but we find this is not actually the case: In one of our studies, we analyzed the network of collaborations of approximately 12,000 Hollywood professionals to explore whether creative success is concentrated at the center of the system or at its margins. What we found surprised us: The most successful artists were not those at the extreme periphery of the network, the “renegades from the human race” — to borrow a label famously coined by Don Valentine, the pioneering venture capitalist who created Sequoia Capital, to describe Steve Jobs, when he first met him in the late 1970s. But neither were they “network kings” at the heart of their industry. The outsiders were not outliers: This study showed that the probability of creative success was highest in a border zone between the center and the periphery, by artists who belong to the system but have not lost touch with its fringes.
Access to the center provides legitimacy while exposure to the fringe provides novelty. The combination of legitimacy and novelty produces impact. Statistically, the people most likely to succeed were those who kept one foot in Hollywood (where they could leverage resources, connections, and legitimacy) and the other foot on the edge (where they would encounter unfamiliar people, places, and habits).
2. Behind every Steve Jobs is a Mike Markkula, a champion on the inside.
Thinking like an outsider can have advantages, but practicing the way of the outsider is complicated. Outsiders are strangers. They do not hold élite positions, and they have limited resources and lack the credentials of better-connected people whose theories or practices they are challenging. Not surprisingly, they often stay locked outside.
Our research suggests that the outsider needs at least one insider who is willing to vouch for their ideas or abilities. In collaboration with Paul Allison, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania Sociology, we went back to our Hollywood network and gathered new data on thousands of awards bestowed by two crucial audiences in this industry: critics and peers. Our statistical analyses revealed that critics were more likely to praise peripheral artists than insiders. Conversely, industry peers are more likely to favor their fellow insiders. From the outsider’s perspective, this means that one effective strategy to gain traction is to identify an audience — a person or a group of people — that has a cognitive or emotional affinity for the outsider or their ideas (as well as the credibility that the outsider usually lacks).
Steve Jobs’s early career is a case in point. The VC industry repeatedly refused to support his project, but Jobs kept searching for a receptive audience. Finally, he met Mike Markkula, a wealthy young engineer who saw potential where the VC establishment saw only roadblocks. He made the first investment in Apple Computer. Why did Markkula support Jobs? Because his passion for technology and relatively young age gave him a stronger affinity with Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak than most members of Silicon Valley’s investment community had. And with Markkula behind him, Jobs had the credibility he needed to attract more talent and money.
3. “Fracture points” let outsiders in.
A third way outsiders break in is by leveraging what we call “fracture points” — events that generate intense stress on the system. One particular class of fracture points that we have been investigating reflects Max Planck’s famous quip that “an important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: It rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out.” The idea is simple: When the gatekeepers die, they create space for the entrance of the new.
In music, for instance, such moments happen after the death of a major artist. Working with Simone Santoni of City University of London, we assembled one of the world’s largest databases of musicians, songs, and music awards, as well as sudden deaths of superstars such as Michael Jackson or Prince. Regardless of the genre, in the years in which the system suffered a fracture point, the probability that a peripheral artist won a Grammy award increased by almost 40% while the chance that a central artist got it went down by 24%. The winning artist’s work also tended to be atypical in style compared to that of a more ordinary year.
4. Disruption is a marketing challenge that can be overcome.
After being rejected by every major journal, Karikó’s breakthrough research was finally published in 2005. For years, however, it still got little attention. “We talked to pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists. No one cared,” her research partner, Drew Weissman, recalled.
Most established organizations and industries tend to reproduce the power and privilege structure of incumbent groups, reducing outsiders’ chances of making their ideas heard and proving their worth. But our research suggests that outsiders should not be daunted: The very traits that make outsiders so disadvantaged within established occupational structures and professional categories are often precisely those required for the pursuit of exceptional entrepreneurial achievements in art, science, and business.
Often, extraordinary outsiders’ primary problem is not their ideas but selling those ideas, precisely because of their disruptive implications. As the late Clayton Christensen noted in his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, “disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.”
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How Outsiders Become Game Changers - Harvard Business Review
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