There are a lot of good remarks in this thread.
I will try to add a point I haven't seen here yet:
Once I was in a big company with a big, famous
research lab.
The group I was in, just three of us, was led by a
guy who had taken some technical work and published
some papers. The journals were peer-reviewed but
semi-popular so reached some ordinary business
customers. The papers fit in with a lot of hype at
the time.
So, some of the customers picked up a phone and
called our group for more information. So, presto,
we got contact with real customers otherwise
essentially forbidden in research.
Why forbidden? Because the sales/marketing guys
wanted to be the guys who had total control over all
contact with customers.
Eventually our little group broke up, and I wanted
to do some research that would lead to products to
be sold to customers. I started to discover that no
one in the company wanted that. The big guys in
research wanted to throttle all contacts outside
research and mostly didn't want any. The people in
sales, marketing, product development, and product
production didn't want to deal with anything new
from research. No one wanted a research worker bee
talking to real customers.
Next, when research did come up with something that
might be of interest to real customers, no one
wanted to pursue that opportunity. Again, the
marketing people wanted to be the source of all new
product/service initiatives. No one in research
wanted a research worker bee to get credit/blame
having a product go from research to success/failure
in the market.
In the end, research was forced to be essentially
irrelevant to the business. Finally research was
turned into a patent shop so that lawyers could take
the big patent portfolio, go to companies, claim
patent infringement, and 'license' the patent
portfolio.
Point: Generally, a business organization, given a
nice new product/service to offer their customers,
has multiple layers of organizations and people,
processes, reasons, etc. why they just do not, not
want to come out with anything new. Period.
Curiously, yes, some of the people at some of the
customer organizations were eager to work with our
group in research as a way to look more innovative
within their own organizations. Here, of course,
they didn't have to work through layers of
managers but only had to exercise their own
freedom to handle their own responsibilities.
So, lesson: Commonly individuals are ready to do
and offer new things to others or try new things
from others, but it's the layers of managers who
block such things.
So, the blockage of these layers of managers is one
of the main reasons and opportunities for
entrepreneurship.
Yes, it's dumber than paint, but it's usually the
way of the world.