Innovation vs. Stagnation in Finance

I'd love to hear your opinions on some thoughts I had about the state of innovation in finance.

I'm absolutely no expert at all in finance. However, from what training programs and internships that I have gone through, I've found most of the strategies, ideas, and approaches within fields like portfolio management, active investing, private equity buyouts, etc. to be extremely rigid, stale, and regurgitated.

While this makes sense for topics like M&A, it seems to me that for a firm to really succeed in finance, you have to "beat the market", and to do so, you have to have a differentiated approach. Everyone knows this is true for HF, but it even applies to fields like PE. If you value a company's potential on a PE deal based on the mainstream analyses, you will end up bidding for the same companies as everyone else. By definition, you won't get a good deal. 

It seems that if you're starting a new fund in PE, for example, the only way to survive and grow is to have a novel investment and operating thesis. For example, when Graham Weaver started Alpine, his approach was to find business with strong foundations and weak management, and to then parachute in strong management. A more innovative example is Wovenlight, which uses data analytic and AI for value creation in their portcos, retaining the metadata from each deal to continually improve their models and efficacy. 

On WSO, I've heard a lot of people talk about how finance industries are past their heydays and are in structural decline. I'm curious how much room you guys think there is for innovation and new approaches in industries like HF and PE. Also, do you think innovation will mainly go forward with AI/ML/tech, or are there opportunities for more qualitative approaches?