Zack KanterVerified account

Also jobs with "Innovation" in title. Also people with purple glasses in said jobs. "Let's have like an incubator but for startups *inside* the company and and and they will have the best of both worlds, the resources of a supertanker with the agility of a ballerina!" Easy tells.

Hmmm... @fortelabs may be the exception.

Amazon’s Lab126 was created in 2004 Ah, I see the “usually” in your tweet

True. For me another strong signal is when a company organize “hackaton” = cheap ideas / marketing survey at the cost of a pizza.

Strong signal that innovation has evaporated from the culture of it needs to be “spun out” like that.https://twitter.com/zackkanter/status/1141096768182071296?s=21 …

It signals the end of a company’s ability to choose. An organization is called “labs” because it doesn’t have a more specific mission - to have a specific mission you have to say no a lot.

Perhaps the idea drought (cause) itself leads to such a creation (effect) in the hope of inspiring innovations? Plus seems like a good way to signal what you don't have - Michael Corleone fake gun scene outside the hospital in godfather 1

What are your thoughts on Googles choice to separate X from core business? Seems like they were trying to learn from the mistakes of Bell Labs and Xerox.

Not so much as the end of risking bringing those innovations to market

Seems like a corollary of the innovator’s dilemma. fwiw, I lived this. Hired into a “Labs” division preparing to spin off into a Product completely separate company from a brokerage. We took most of the innovation with us.