Bleeding Edge

The phrase emerged in the early 1980s as a darkly humorous riff on "leading edge" and "cutting edge" — implying that pushing further than the frontier could draw blood. The earliest documented use dates to 1983, when an unnamed banking executive used it to describe Storage Technology Corporation's risky product bets. From there it spread through the emerging technology industry over the following decade, capturing a phenomenon that older terms couldn't: that some innovations are so untested they wound as often as they lead.