Why companies lose their best innovators (2019)
Corporations aren&#x27;t really meant to be all that innovative. In practice corporations are designed to be extremely disposable. They can be unwound up on failure and spun up relatively easily. There isn&#x27;t a rule saying that these companies can&#x27;t innovate, but why should Cisco even be trying to write a teleconference client? There is no fault to be found that they didn&#x27;t capitalise on what became Zoom.<p>Best of breed corporations are often characterised by a focus on key ideas and their variations - look at Apple, pretty much all their products are variants of an iPad at different sizes and different target audiences. Picking some other global Fortune 500s: Walmart and Amazon, profound dedication to logistics. DuPont knows chemistry, Boeing mastered turbulence and propulsion. A couple of big extractors that know how to claim resources from the natural world. These companies are all very innovative, but also profoundly focused. They will really struggle to cope with innovations that aren&#x27;t in the area of their strategic edge.<p>It isn&#x27;t a loss to anyone if the next trillion-dollar idea spins out as a new company instead of growing within an existing major. If someone has great ideas, we should invest in the person not in their employer. And they should stand to profit from their own success.