What does it take for a company to maintain innovation?
After reading an interesting article in Harvard Business Review, “How Microsoft became innovative again”, I wasn’t so much prompted to wonder how the company has managed to transition from selling shrink-wrapped boxes of software under the dead hand of Steve Ballmer to once again be an interesting company under Satya Nadella; and instead on the nature of corporate innovation cycles. And more specifically, about whether the Steve Ballmers of this world are a precondition for the Satya Nadellas to emerge.
Innovation in companies is often the result of a moment of inspiration, typically at the moment of the company’s inception. This is usually the case with big tech: the idea of creating an easy-to-use computer was behind Apple, just as the idea of creating a search engine with a different mechanism based on off-page criteria instead of on-page gave rise to Google. However, the evolution of the two companies from that point on was very different, which means that today, Apple is still ranked among the most innovative companies in the world, unlike Google.
Microsoft is a similar case: the possibility of creating the operating system for a computer that IBM turned into a standard gave birth to the company and turned it into a virtual monopoly, but Steve Ballmer’s disastrous management and lack of vision relegated it to a…
