An AI-boosted search for prescient ideas finds they're more likely to come from the periphery than the core
Innovation is often more of an organic process without any specific eureka moment or single inventor.
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Investors and business leaders are always on the lookout for the next big thing, the paradigm shift that will upend industries and change the world. The hope is to get in early and ride the wave — or at least avoid getting flattened by it. Yet where should they be looking?
“There’s a huge literature on innovation,” says Amir Goldberg, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of the perennial debates is whether new ideas are more likely to come from established players or new entrants in a field — those in the core or on the periphery, so to speak.”
There are plenty of examples of each. “In American culture, we celebrate the plucky outsider, the maverick who bucks conventional thinking,” Goldberg says. But many game-changing innovations come from dominant firms, like the Apple iPhone or the invention of transformer architecture at Google, which revolutionized artificial intelligence.
The problem with such anecdotes, he says, is that they focus on the moment of creation, not conception. “We see the tangible outcome, but who knows where the original spark came from?” Anyway, he adds, innovation is often more of an organic process without any specific eureka moment or single inventor.
But a few years ago, Goldberg and Paul Vicinanzaopen in new window, PhD ’23, along with Sameer Srivastavaopen in new window, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, had a breakthrough idea of their own. Seeing how emerging AI programs could digest vast amounts of documents, they wondered if they could deploy these tools to detect early signs of new thinking in language.
This piece originally appeared in Stanford Business Insights from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To receive business ideas and insights from Stanford GSB click here: (To sign up: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/about/emails)