# The frontier of what your company knows. Every answer pushes it a little further.

Beyond what your company knows are the hard questions: where to grow, which customers are leaving. Middleout investigates them, and every accepted answer pushes that edge out.

## An idea that comes from science.

### In science

In science, the frontier of knowledge is the state of the art: the furthest anyone has got on a subject. What lies inside can be taught, cited and used. Outside are the open questions, the ones nobody can answer yet. Research is work done right at that edge: starting from everything that is known to answer something nobody had answered.

### Every answer opens new questions

When an investigation closes, the frontier moves a little outward, and new questions almost always appear that couldn't even be asked before. That's why the frontier never ends: it grows with every answer.

### The same happens in a company

Your company has a state of the art too: its agreed definitions, its metrics, its decisions and what it has already investigated. Outside are the questions that shape its future and that nobody has managed to answer with data: where to grow, which customers are leaving and why, what price the market will bear, which category to open. In most companies that frontier is invisible: nobody quite knows what is known and what isn't, and those questions get settled by opinion.

### Not every question is at the frontier

Why margin dropped in August or how much a store sold are important questions, but they're answered from the inside: with the data and definitions the company already has. Frontier questions are a different kind. They're strategic, they cut across several teams and their answer isn't stored anywhere: it has to be built.

### What isn't known, in plain sight

Middleout makes the frontier visible. What is backed by data goes into your company's memory, with its numbers and where they come from. What has no answer yet stays as an open question, in plain sight, instead of getting lost in a meeting.

### How Middleout moves it

Frontier questions aren't answered with a query: they're investigated. Middleout starts from everything your company already knows, proposes several possible answers, looks in your data for what supports or rules out each one, and keeps in plain sight what has no backing yet. When your team accepts a conclusion, it becomes part of your company's state of the art, and the next hard question starts from there.

## Questions about this

### How does what my company knows grow?

Through its people. Every time someone asks, analyzes or investigates with the company's data and documents, they find out something nobody knew before. Middleout keeps it so it isn't lost, and what your company knows grows with every question.