This paper aims to present an interview with Gary Hamel asking an existential question that all long‐established firms need to face: “Is there an effective competitive response to counter innovation by startups, and if so, what is it?”.
The paper presents Hamel's evaluation of current alternatives to dealing with the issue.
The paper concludes that the most reliable survival strategy is continuous innovation, which requires radical management innovation.
Hamel concludes that most large organizations must make fundamental changes in the way they are managed, if they wish to survive. One key step: enable first‐level and second‐level employees to obtain small amounts of experimental capital or time to work on something that's new.
Hamel warns that fewer than one company out of 100 has made innovation part of every employee's job or trained every employee to be an innovator, but doing so is a matter of survival.
