I think that's why a lot of innovation comes from "outsiders" rather than industry veterans. You are more likely to notice the anomalies with fresh eyes and stop noticing them through time.
Conversely, I have seen that some of the most boring startups that you never hear of, but are killing it, are built by domain experts who know the task they're trying to solve inside and out. Two examples from my own country, Spain:
- A man who built a SaaS for local administrations and has about a ~50% share of the market. He spent 30 years working for the Spanish IRS in different positions. I don't know the insider story, but looking at the website he just made a SaaS solution with good UX in a space where UX tends to be atrocious.
- RatedPower's CTO. RatedPower makes a software that automates the design of renewable power plants. This guy had been drawing the plans by hand as a renewables engineer, realized a computer would be perfectly equipped to do it, and the competition in the space had grown complacent and barely innovated in years, so he did it.
The older I grow the more I get excited by boring ideas. People pitch ideas to me frequently and most of the time I literally end up thinking "not boring enough"!
I agree. Things fall into existing grooves. Your band comes up with a new sound and people say, "That's kind of like Mazzy Star," and now you point it more that way. It falls into that nearby groove instead of continuing on its own. A lot of great sounds came out of the 1960s because there were so few grooves. No one knew what the rules were.
Plus, a lot of low hanging fruit stays there because no one looks at it. Everyone is looking at x, y, and z, and there are a thousand variations of those, and they ignore a, b, and c because no one brought it up.
