Can Mature Companies Innovate
from the maybe-not dept
An interesting look at whether or not large mature companies can innovate. The end suggestions is that, no, for the most part, they can't. They can talk about innovation, and try to innovate, but they're too focused on squeezing money out of existing businesses. This is, of course, good for a "startup culture", but I wonder how true it is. Unfortunately, despite being a "journal" article, there is very little actual evidence presented beyond anecdotal stories.
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Can Mature Companies Innovate
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Re: Can Mature Companies Innovate
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Re: Can Mature Companies Innovate
I'd love to hear a larger discussion from the techdirt community about experiences, suggestions (cultural or technological) on making such a process/technology work--either here or on idea-x itself. I'd even like to hear flames on why it wouldn't work, or bad experiences within a corporate setting.
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Re: Can Mature Companies Innovate
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but do startups really innovate?
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Re: but do startups really innovate?
Smaller companies or individuals are usually responsible for innovations to underlying architectural issues such as making real small or real cheap hard disks for use in devices that haven't traditionally been able to use hard disks.
I find myself personally going through this. I build large systems for the healthcare industry. After years of designing and coding on the same, very large, system, it is really easy to get deep into improving some arcane aspect of it. There is no argument that this kind of task is well worth doing becuase it is almost always something the users want and it will improve their ability to get the job done. Sometime the ideas are innovative, but this isn't really innovation.
When I get a chance to delve into new areas, putting part of the application online for a different user base, for instance, I look at the overall system from a very different perspective and often come up with very exciting and untapped functionality.
I think this is part of the emotion that fueled the dot-com boom - being able to go grocery shopping, for instance, in a very very different manner. It wasn't necessarily innovative or even good, but a few good things came from it.
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