ation safely through the initial period of high risk, high frustration and modest reward, since few begin as obvious commercial winners, even such classics as xerography. Successful innovation also seems to require a fair degree of personal and financial slack, the closest possible link between marketplace and technology, and a context that can tolerate and learn from failure (Quinn 1985, Kanter 1988, Peters 1990). Finally, it requires a context that values diversity, generates a marketplace for ideas and harnesses 'creative conflict' (Eisenhardt et al 1997, Leonard and Straus 1997). Few large firms have found it easy to institutionalise such a process within traditional organisational contexts, and many entrepreneurial firms seem to lose their capacity for innovation as they grow and develop into more formal organisations over time. Quinn (1985) identified a number of very significant barriers including top management conservatism and isolation from the innovation process, intolerance for fanatics and 'non-conformist' talent, short time horizons for expected payback, excessive rationalisation and routinization of the process, excessive bureaucracy and inappropriate rewards. More generally, the traditional organisation has found it difficult to accommodate the more creative and non-conformist types who like to immerse themselves in technical challenges, often for the sheer intellectual pleasure of the chase, and whose preferred working habits tend to "contradict organizational expectations and mores" (Sinetar 1985, p58). Larger organisations are often poorer protectors of the property rights of innovators, where the gains from innovation are more diffusely distributed (Acs et al 1997), and the reward and control systems in the larger organisation are too often designed to minimise surprise, yet in the innovation process "surprises are the name of the game" (Schneiderman 1991, p.54). However, some large firms have been able to rise to th...
