Are You an Outlier?

What does it take to be truly innovative?  The most succesful innovators actually redefine the staus quo and move the bar for the rest of the design world.  These outliers and their seemingly fringe ideas catch on and displace  established expectations and ways of doing things.  They find a way to create new synergies between things that previously seemed unrelated.  They define issues that others just worked around as actual problems and work to solve them.    It's always a risk to be an early adapter http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_rogers_innovation_adoption_curve.html because you might ride that wave head first right into the sandbar  but, really to make a difference as architects, we need to embrace our status as outliers.