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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Can Mature Companies Innovate
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Can Mature Companies Innovate
[ link to this | view in thread ]
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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Can Mature Companies Innovate
[ link to this | view in thread ]
but do startups really innovate?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]