> Quantitative research suggests that big companies do different kinds of R&D than their more modest counterparts. Instead of coming up with new products, they

> Quantitative research suggests that big companies do different kinds of R&D than their more modest counterparts. Instead of coming up with new products, they come up with process improvements. "If the nature of innovation is distorted toward selling to an incumbent, you're going to get more feature-driven innovation rather than systemic disruption," ... I can anecdotally confirm this. I spent the summer in 2018 doing research at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. While there, I attended a presentation by the director of the Future Interfaces Group[0], Chris Harrison. He described some incredibly cool technology his group had developed over many years (for example, ViBand in 2014[1]). At the end of his presentation I asked: if this technology has existed for years, with accessible implementations available from researchers, why isn't it in consumer products yet? His exasperated response echoed the quote above -- big companies like the safety of the status quo, and don't need to innovate if what they have is working well-enough. In other words, they are extremely risk-averse when it comes to revolutionary technology. More recently, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. O'Mara at a presentation about her book. Based on her informative book talk, and a skim of the book, I can highly recommend it. [0]: http://www.figlab.com/about-us http://www.figlab.com/about-us [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0MeASmuY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0MeASmuY