Opinion

December 8, 2020

A former Google and Twitter staffer: this is why corporate innovation isn’t working

Mimicking the surface rituals of innovative companies isn't enough, you need to be asking three deeper questions.


Brendan Kearns

5 min read

Woman having fun with a VR headset

Professor Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School says that we used to think of the competitive environment as a sort of equilibrium with long periods of stability between seismic disruptions. But now things are different. "The disruptions are coming closer and closer together. The competitive environment is in perpetual motion," says McGrath. She's right. McKinsey famously reported that the average lifespan of a company in the S&P500 in the late 1950s was 61 years, by 2027, it's expected to be just 12.

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