Innovation in the Corporate Morass

There are a plethora of reasons, and many of them quite valid, that corporations or other large organizations are largely incapable of being innovative.   Innovative ideas are subjected to bureaucracy, politics, committees, personal agendas, group think, and many other cultural dysfunctions  that were instituted to ensure that any new idea was reviewed, approved, risk-managed, and adapted to the point that it was thoroughly denatured and rendered utterly impotent.

But there is at the same time the argument that large organizations are necessary to innovation in the present day, and I think it does hold some water.  Primarily, the corporation is a source of resources to creation on a grand scale.  No single individual has the knowledge and resources to tackle a project of significant scope in a reasonable amount of time.

Much of this is due to technical progress.   In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, many revolutionary devices were developed by a lone inventor or a small team, working in a small workshop in their spare time, with very little money.   But as technology progressed and advances, the workshop inventor fell by the wayside and the research and development arms of large organizations took over.

Consider that Orville and Wilbur Wright built an airplane in their bicycle shop and Henry Ford built a prototype of a new car in his tool shed. The Boeing 787 and the Tesla electric car were not sketched out on a cocktail napkin and cobbled together in someone’s garage: such innovations required thousands of people, millions of dollars, and many months to develop the first prototype.

That’s not to say that innovation is the sole demesne of large organizations.   The “first” of most devices can still be cobbled together by the workshop inventor and many likely will, though there are some that cannot even be attempted without significant resources.  But innovation, which consists of taking something that someone else invented and making it better, requires a broader range of expertise and more extensive resources to effect.

My sense is that it is fair to say that corporations are the patrons of invention and innovation in the present day, and that the number of advancements developed under the aegis of large organizations far outstrip those done by a lone inventor.

But at the same time, the preventative mechanisms of bureaucracy inhibit innovation.  Though some firms have attempted to overcome this limitation by various means, progress seems slow in this regard.