Innovators need thick skin more than an idea: Malcolm Gladwell

"This is the story of a man with an idea who applies his creativity and imagination and changed the paradigm," said Gladwell. "Freireich was a poor kid from Chicago. He didn't have much to lose because he never belonged. Because he was an outsider, it gave him freedom. The third thing: he was desperate ("there are 10 kids in my ward that are going to die").

Gladwell, who works as a full-time writer for the New Yorker, said this 10-year window was the most productive in the history of cancer research. Gladwell said the people who shorted sub-prime during the boom times also took a social risk, as others rode the boom getting richer. "Those who shorted sub-prime were outside Wall Street with no social status to lose," he said.

Similarly, the founder of IKEA set up a factory in Poland at the height of the Cold War, around the time the Berlin Wall came up in 1961. "It is like someone going to North Korea now," said Gladwell, "It was an extraordinary act of audacity."

What compelled Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA's founder, to go from West to East, from Sweden to Poland was because manufacturers in his country were boycotting him. His company was on the verge of bankruptcy, 'about to come to a rumbling halt'. 

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