push the envelope

To expand on, exceed, or test the limits of the established norm or standard. The company is renowned for pushing the envelope whenever they develop a new piece of technology. If you want to make a name for yourself in the art world, then you can't be afraid of pushing the envelope. It's a natural stage for most teenagers to push the envelope of their parents' rules.

Fig. to expand the definition, categorization, dimensions, or perimeters of something. The engineers wanted to completely redesign the product, but couldn't push the envelope because of a very restricted budget.

Exceed the limits of what is normally done, be innovative, as in They are pushing the envelope in using only new fabrics for winter clothing. This idiom comes from aviation, the envelope alluding to the technical limits of a plane's performance, which, on a graph, appear as a rising slope as limits of speed and stress are approached and falls off when the capacity is exceeded and the pilot loses control; safety lies within these limits, or envelope, and exceeding them exposes pilot and plane to risk. [Slang; late 1960s]

If you push the envelope, you do something to a greater degree or in a more extreme way than it has been done before. We have to keep pushing the envelope, trying new technologies and developing better methods. There's a valuable place for fashion and design that pushes the envelope a bit. Note: Rather than referring to stationery, the sense of envelope here is probably the one used to refer to the shape of a wave in electronics or a curve in mathematics. Pushing or stretching the envelope suggests changing the properties of the wave or curve.

To exceed or try to exceed the existing limits of a discipline or activity.

Go to extremes, go beyond accepted limits. This term comes from flight testing in the 1960s, where envelope signifies the limits of safe performance, and pushing it means to fly an aircraft faster or higher or dive more steeply than had ever been attempted in order to see what it could do. By the 1980s the expression was used figuratively, and so widely that it has become a cliché. Opera singer Renée Fleming used it in The Inner Voice (2004): “You want to go out there, push the envelope, and do something you’ve never done before.”