Towards a Liberal Green alliance

In every crisis there is an opportunity. In business schools we often talk about creative destruction being key to social progress in a capitalist system. What happens is the incumbent large firms become overly bureaucratic and stuck in their ways. Then a new technology comes along, such as a quartz watch, or a digital camera, and these firms and their comfortable bosses don’t respond swiftly enough. You can picture the conversations: ‘Our Kodak film is far superior to those digital gadgets people pretend are cameras’ or ‘Our watches have the best mechanics developed over centuries, how dull to replace craftsmanship with electronics!’. Such firms face new competition and soon enough decline sets in. Rather than recognising the threats and investing heavily in the new disruptive innovations, many bosses of large firms respond cautiously, and cut back everywhere. The result? Like Kodak, once massive firms eventually go out of business. This process of ‘disruptive innovation’ is why the average age of a company on the S&P 500 share index is only 15 years. Could there be lessons here for the creative destruction of political parties?