There is a dark, untold back story of innovation that may disturb you: many of the earliest forms of the world’s biggest technological advancements were pioneered by bad people in morally corrupt contexts. The most radical innovation in video streaming started in the pornography industry. The most sophisticated uses of messaging technologies started with drug traffickers and terrorists. Counterfeiters have pimped digital technologies to such an advanced state that governments are rethinking the use of paper-based currencies.

Why does innovation often start in dark places? When you’re working in the fringes, the normal risks and rewards associated with radical change suddenly become different: you have a lot less to lose, but you can also gain a lot more.

The relevant analogy here is a bell curve. The closer you get to the middle of the curve, the more things are pulled toward normalcy. The farther away you get from the middle, the more deviance you see. This is exactly where these dark places exist: at the high-deviance edges of the curve, at either the crisis points or points of exceptional success. I call this the 20/80 rule: it’s easier to change 20% of an organization 80% than it is to change 80% of your organization 20%.

If we want to combat these dark places and catch the people doing bad things, we need to move along the bell curve with them and perhaps beyond. We need to start innovating at the points of extremity, where things are going really well or really poorly, where the risk of failure is low but the potential rewards are high.