The Economist has published an analysis challenging what it calls "the myths of corporate innovation," a signal that core assumptions in R&D management are back under scrutiny.

The article itself sits behind the newspaper's paywall, and the syndicated headline does not disclose the specific myths it dismantles, the case studies it draws on, or the data behind its argument. For R&D managers, that limits what can be verified at this stage. What is clear is the editorial target: the comfortable narratives companies tell about how innovation happens inside large organizations.

Why does this matter now?

Corporate innovation orthodoxy has accumulated layers over two decades — internal venture units, corporate accelerators, skunkworks labs, innovation theatre of various kinds. Each wave arrived with confident claims about returns that rarely faced public audit. An Economics-section treatment from The Economist suggests the newspaper's writers judged the evidence base solid enough to argue against the prevailing story rather than merely report on it.

For portfolio decision-makers, the relevant question is methodological. Which claims in the article rest on measured outcomes — survival rates of corporate ventures, R&D productivity figures, documented failure rates — and which are analytical framing? The headline gives no sample sizes, no funding amounts and no named cases, so readers should treat any conclusions as provisional until the full text is checked against its sourcing.

What should R&D managers take from it?

Even without the body text, the prompt is useful. Innovation-programme budgets are typically justified with reference to widely repeated claims: that incumbents cannot disrupt themselves, that spin-offs outperform internal units, that big firms buy rather than build. If The Economist is interrogating myths of this kind, the practical next step is to ask the same questions of internal business cases:

• Which benchmark figures in your innovation pitch deck trace back to primary evidence rather than repeated citation?
• Which internal metrics separate measured results from projections?
• Who funded the studies your programme's assumptions rest on?

The article's appearance in The Economist, rather than a management title, also matters. It signals the argument is pitched at the level of corporate strategy and economic evidence, not vendor marketing.

Anyone budgeting for innovation programmes in the next planning cycle should read the full piece — and then test its claims against their own portfolio data rather than swapping one set of unexamined assumptions for another. Whether the newspaper's argument holds will depend on the evidence it presents, and readers with access will want to weigh that evidence directly.