Peripheral actors are a recognised source of novelty, but how they assemble viable value configurations before central actors, platforms or policy institutions take notice remains poorly understood. This paper develops Qiaomiao innovation as a mode of peripheral innovation in which actors recognise relationally latent resources, configure connections across separately governed domains, convert costs or constraints into value sources, and layer complementary value streams into ecosystem-level value architectures. Three qualitative cases from China, spanning food processing, agrivoltaics and e-commerce logistics, show how peripheral actors work across categories that dominant systems often treat as separate: meat and by-products, energy and grazing, fulfilment and advertising. Using abductive inference to the best explanation, the paper compares five candidate explanations drawn from creative marginality, frugal innovation, bricolage and effectuation, business model and ecosystem research, and organisational ingenuity. Each explains part of the pattern, but none fully captures how peripheral position enables actors without architectural authority to integrate these elements into a distinctive configurational logic. The study contributes to research on peripheral innovation by explaining how such configurations become economically viable before central recognition, and by showing how partial visibility can create both imitation barriers and accountability risks.