Organizations reject good external ideas because they weren't developed internally.
Katz and Allen's 1982 study of R&D groups found performance declining after about five years of stable membership. The rejection is not stupidity but a status defence disguised as a quality judgement.
In practice
- An engineering team rejects a mature open-source library and spends two years building a worse one.
- A council declines a neighbouring authority's working system on grounds that turn out, on examination, to be that it was theirs.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- How organisations behave when nobody is steering