Malcom Gladwell comments on the fringes that exist within an organisation in his article for the New Yorker about workplace design.

More precisely, as one study after another has demonstrated ,the best ideas in any workplace arise out of casual contacts among different groups within the same company. If you are designing widgets for Acme.com, for instance, it is unlikely that a breakthrough idea is going to come from someone else on the widget team: after all, the other team members are as blinkered by the day-to-day demands of dealing with the existing product as you are.