Minds Worth Meeting

Can large companies successfully innovate? The popular narrative is the bigger firms become, the less nimble and dynamic they are. Small startups are the disruptors, while big companies are doomed to being static and inflexible. But according to Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School, this is a myth: large businesses can be just as innovative as startups. But to reach that point, you need to understand the four distinct types of innovation, how to devise a strategy for implementing transformation and, crucially, the importance of an innovative culture. In this episode, Minds Worth Meeting speaks with Pisano about his recent book, “Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation” (PublicAffairs, January 2019). In “Creative Construction,” Pisano criticizes both the fatalism about the ability of Big Business to innovate and the overly simplified notion that to be dynamic, companies need to “be like Uber.” Large, established firms are entirely different from those born as startups; they need to thi