Why Does Every Company Need a Frontier Team?
Josh Woodward says every company needs a set of people whose job is the frontier. If they have not heard the latest thing going viral in the last 24 hours, they are missing the job. They stay plugged into how other people are building, the model releases, and the tools everyone else is trying, including the ones that cost about $200 a month. The organization has to give that group a place to exist.
A place to watch is not enough. Those people also need an environment where they can build, and then a bridge into the rest of the company so the work is not written off as a weird research group of gimmicks and toys. Someone has to look at a thing that looks like a toy and say it will be essential in five years.
A large company that starts a lab often sees it turn ineffective and fizzle after about three to four years, or the lab lasts and the company still never commercializes what comes out. Someone else spots the future and builds it as a separate company. The first two pieces can be right and the third can still fail, and then the whole effort does not matter.
