[TheOtherHobbes]

Although I sometimes wonder how much survivor bias there is in these stories.

How many misfit teams failed?

Which is not to defend corporate hyper-control at all. But I suspect that knowing how often skunkworks projects work, and how success can be affected by different personalities and corporate contexts, might be useful information.

[wslh]

It is more complex than that. In some fields there was a culture of labs and special projects. IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox, and many other companies followed that route and there were corporations with a lot of bureaucracy.

Good thread in /r/AskHistorians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxnd1/what_...