Intermittent aberrations: Can mature companies innovate

Abstract

A whole literature has grown up around the apparently intractable hostility between innovation and bureaucracy, between those who create and those who control. Smart and speedy start-ups blindside mature companies with their inventiveness then grow up into mature companies and are outsmarted in their turn. The only way for innovation to survive in mature companies is to isolate the creators from the managers in protected enclaves. If this is true, it means that it is virtually impossible for sustained innovation to be built into the everyday operation of mature companies; it can only ever be an intermittent aberration.