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"Innovation is key" is a mantra that sounds good, but it's not true. It's what people want to believe. It's like saying you need to constantly buy lottery ticke

"Innovation is key" is a mantra that sounds good, but it's not true. It's what people want to believe. It's like saying you need to constantly buy lottery tickets so you don't risk being a poor retiree. If you have established a business and you bank on "innovation" your likelihood of anything from a net loss to catastrophic failure is actually quite high. In the long run, most companies fail anyway, whether they attempt to innovate or not. Case in point, those companies that did survive in the S&P 500 since its inception don't strike me as particularly innovative: http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2017-only-12-remain-thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/ http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2017...

chefkoch 8y ago
>Case in point, those companies that did survive in the S&P 500 since its inception don't strike me as particularly innovative: Really? Except food i think there has been lots of innovation in the particular industries. Care to name innovative examples?
- baud147258 8y ago
  Even in food, you'd find a lot of innovation, in packaging, processing, additives...
sacheendra 8y ago
3M, Dow, DuPont, Boeing, IBM, J&J, Lockheed, Monsanto, and lot of others on the list do quite innovative stuff. Its the just that failures get publicized by the news cycle as a waste of money and successes do not.
- arcturus17 8y ago
  Or the probably bad reading of Clayton Christensen that concludes that big businesses simply can’t innovate.
syshum 8y ago
Most of the companies that did not survive did so because they did not innovate, they did not change with the times, that did not respond to market pressures or changes Do you honestly believe these companies failed because they innovated too much?
blackflame7000 8y ago
You must be a former blockbuster executive. Innovation isn't coming out with the next big thing, it's doing something a little better each day based on what you learned yesterday.
rayiner 8y ago
That’s like a list of the most innovative companies in America. Do you know how much technology goes into say paper making? At Georgia Tech we had an entire research institute for paper science.

chefkoch 8y ago

>Case in point, those companies that did survive in the S&P 500 since its inception don't strike me as particularly innovative: Really? Except food i think there has been lots of innovation in the particular industries. Care to name innovative examples?

baud147258 8y ago
Even in food, you'd find a lot of innovation, in packaging, processing, additives...

sacheendra 8y ago

3M, Dow, DuPont, Boeing, IBM, J&J, Lockheed, Monsanto, and lot of others on the list do quite innovative stuff. Its the just that failures get publicized by the news cycle as a waste of money and successes do not.

arcturus17 8y ago
Or the probably bad reading of Clayton Christensen that concludes that big businesses simply can’t innovate.

syshum 8y ago

Most of the companies that did not survive did so because they did not innovate, they did not change with the times, that did not respond to market pressures or changes Do you honestly believe these companies failed because they innovated too much?

blackflame7000 8y ago

You must be a former blockbuster executive. Innovation isn't coming out with the next big thing, it's doing something a little better each day based on what you learned yesterday.

rayiner 8y ago

That’s like a list of the most innovative companies in America. Do you know how much technology goes into say paper making? At Georgia Tech we had an entire research institute for paper science.