[GuiA]

These history changing works come from very small groups of people within the company, who usually only stick around when the environment enables their work to thrive. Oftentimes, a single fantastic key manager who protected all the engineers/designers/researchers from infighting/politics/etc. leaving is enough to completely obliterate that team, and kill any chances the company had at replicating the successes the group built up.

Alan Kay said it best:

"I don’t run CDG, I visit it. [Xerox PARC founder Robert] Taylor didn’t want to hire anyone who needed to be managed. That’s not the way it works. I have people on my list who are already moving in great directions, according to their own inner visions. I didn’t have to explain to these people what they would be working on, because they already are."

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xer...

So there really are two prerequisite things to great innovation:

- populating your group with people who are at the very top of their game

- finding someone with the right balance of hard/soft skills needed to both be respected by these brilliant researchers, and to act as an interface between them and the rest of the company politics/bureaucracy/etc (for a startup, that'd be investors/boardmembers/etc.) and make sure they stay on track.

Each of these things is crazy hard, and accomplishing both is exponentially so. Which is why these brilliant teams only appear every once in a while, and even then are still likely to fail.