For the changes the article is predicting, for at least 20 years there's not even as much as a weak little hoot of a tiny chance of the change happening to any significant extent.

It's an OLD story with a very well known outcome -- the change struggles, dies, and doesn't happen and people give up.

And the reasons are very well known:

(1) Downside Only.

Broadly in companies, people in middle management are evaluated very strictly on very specific criteria. Basically for a job description, a superior writes it and the subordinate is to DO IT.

The norms for nearly all the company and especially for middle line management, are rock solid that the job descriptions never require doing something, as in the article, creative to save the company.

So, no middle manager ever gets a negative mark for failing to do something creative, that likely no one in the company understands, to save the company. Doesn't happen.

A middle manager who sponsors a project that fails gets a really BIG black mark that can end his career. So, for sponsoring a creative project, there is a big downside.

Suppose the manager sponsors a creative project and it is successful, say, quite successful, even saves the company? What is the upside? Since usually the middle manager doesn't have an equity position in the company, there is little upside.

And if the project is seen as successful internally, then everyone else in management will feel threatened and will undercut, sabotage, gang up on, and otherwise destroy the career of the 'successful' manager.

Net, for a middle manager to sponsor a creative project has essentially only downside.

(2) Managing Creative Projects.

To do something 'creative', from the aspect of practical management within a large company, there are really only two approaches:

(A) The CEO sponsors such projects. However typically in a large company, the CEO is too busy to sponsor a project.

(B) The CEO sets up a 'creative division'. Such a division typically gets resentment and no cooperation from the rest of the company and, finally, gives up on helping the company and spends its time in make-work, junk-think, busy-work, nonsense projects. When the next CEO comes in, the group is axed.

(3) The Extant Business Model.

A large business has a successful 'business model'. Mostly what the company does is JUST execute that business model, that is, stay with their 'bird in the hand' and not go looking for more birds in the bush. Or finding good birds is difficult; they already have one good bird; so, they would rather nurture that bird than go on the difficult search for more good birds. To execute the business model does not require, in any very direct or accepted sense, doing something new and creative. So, net, creative projects are not welcome.

(4) Professionalism.

There is a role for creativity in the economy, but one important condition is a lot of highly respected professionalism of the creative workers. Such professionalism typically has some high formal education requirements, a strong professional society, professional peer-review, professional liability, and government licensing. Examples include law, medicine, and some fields of engineering. So far, 'creative software' does not qualify.

Without the professional respect, a creative worker is trying to paddle a small canoe up a tall waterfall.

Note: For law in companies, how do lawyers not get eviscerated by the rest of the middle management? One way is, there is a rule in the legal profession that any working lawyer must be supervised only by a lawyer. So, really, in companies, lawyers are insulted from the usual middle manager organizational struggles.

(5) How to Be Creative.

If someone has a great idea for something creative that will be valuable, then they should start a business. They should be the CEO of that business, the main source of creative ideas for that business, and the main sponsor of additional creative work for that business. The creative direction of the CEO becomes the 'business model' for that business.

Then the valuable results are provided to other businesses as products or services. If the 'creative' work can make money this way, then fine. Otherwise, net, f'get about it. Sorry 'bout that.

To some extent, the large companies change. So, something that starts off being creative and becomes quite successful can be taken up by the 'field' of the business as standard, accepted practice. A good example was using linear programming to manage an oil refinery. How? Each day at the refinery, you have supplies of crude oil available with an analysis of each supply. You also have the selling prices of the various possible products -- naphtha, gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene, motor oil, heating oil, etc. So, your mission, and you have to accept it, is to say how much of each crude supply to process and how much of each of the possible products to produce to make the greatest profit.

When this bit of 'optimization' first became possible, the gains were large enough that the work was accepted as part of the standard technology of operating an oil refinery. Indeed, the Chicago branch office of IBM was selling mainframe computers, at some millions of dollars each, for just this calculation.

Actually, however, it is still the case that much of the creative work is performed by specialized companies that supply their results to the refiners and not by the refiners themselves.

An "old story"? Right: The bones in the graveyard have tombstones reading applied statistics, management science, operations research, applied research, etc.

Net, a big company that might be 'saved' by some creative work in computing mostly won't worry because there is little chance there will be any competitor who will make any significant business progress from any such creative work. So, why bother? Usually the answer is, don't bother.

There is an example of how to make such creative projects work: Find a nice area and set up a research group. Fund the research group directly by the company and as approved directly by the CEO. Have the research group visit the operating groups and select problems to work on. The research group selects their own problems. The research group works on the problems on their own funding. Typically a project goes from two months to two years before it ends. When the research group believes that they have something valuable for an operating group, that group is contacted. The operating group decides whether to implement the project. If the project is implement, then the financial results are carefully tracked. For the first three years of implementation, half the financial gains are credited to the operating group and half to the research group. After the first three years, all the gains are credited to the operating group. With such accounting, typically only about one research project in 10 is successful in making money for the company, but the research group can return about $3 to the company for each $1 in the funding of the research group. When the research group goes for funding, the CEO always offers more money than the group wants, and the group always declines the extra money! That's one way to execute 'creativity' successfully in a company. It can help if all the general managers of the operating groups have Ph.D. degrees, say, in chemical engineering, and if the company is owned by the CEO.