By which metric would you measure this "efficiency"?
The difference between VC-backed-startups vs traditional R&D departments is that the first one seems more short sighted, and with a tendency towards a narrow subset of IT problems with high scalability and disruptive potential, while the second one works on a wide array of industries and applications where the parent company already has the benefits of economies of scale.
"By which metric would you measure this "efficiency"?"
Good question. A few ideas:
-- ROIC
-- Competitive advantage versus peers (hard to measure, but one attempt: http://web.mit.edu/is08/pdf/Parrish.pdf)
-- Share of market
-- Enlargement of market
-- Quality of hiring versus peers
These are the things that can make a company last for centuries. The hunch I was stating -- though admittedly without a clear way to prove it yea or nay -- is that enterprises that invest in small nimble VC-backed technology companies will begin to outperform, on these measures, traditional in-house R&D departments.
The difference between VC-backed-startups vs traditional R&D departments is that the first one seems more short sighted, and with a tendency towards a narrow subset of IT problems with high scalability and disruptive potential, while the second one works on a wide array of industries and applications where the parent company already has the benefits of economies of scale.