From the course: Leading with Innovation

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Corporate skunkworks and innovation

Corporate skunkworks and innovation

From the course: Leading with Innovation

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Corporate skunkworks and innovation

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- The term "Skunkworks" refers to a unit of a company set up explicitly to encourage exceptional creativity and the pursuit of new ideas. Located some distance from corporate headquarters, the unit takes a group of people away from their regular work environment and gives them freedom to pursue radical innovations. During World War II, Lockheed Martin used the Skunkworks approach to develop high-speed fighter planes to help the allies win the war. In the late 1970s, IBM used the Skunkworks approach to allow some workers to break away from the company's mainframe mindset and launch the PC in record time. For many years, the IBM PC remained the most successful response to Apple's computers. Amazon's Lab126, located in Silicon Valley, away from corporate headquarters in Seattle, provides a recent Skunkworks example. It's charged with designing and engineering high-profile consumer electronic devices. A slew of extremely…

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