Three ways to scale-up: two ways to keep your innovative DNA and one sure way to kill it

I like the way some large companies manage to shape their hierarchy in a way that it forms a network of empowered startups-like units that are working towards the execution of a powerful shared vision but keep the freedom to work on it even in competing ways. Instead of enforcing lots of ?strategic? process and tools companywide these companies allow their units to find their own way which later can be adopted by other units upon success.

There are those companies that will accept and promote organisational feuds to let them find their best operating ways while structuring a minimal governance layer that works more corporate notaries, assuring that a crucial and minimal set of legal, financial, compliance and regulatory rules are being respected, but letting the smaller units to structure themselves as autonomous organisations.  

Now, the obvious way to actually kill innovation, which is what lots of companies, and especially most managers, are still pursuing nowadays that is to adopt a simplistic version of Frederick the Great's Administrative Practice, which was a remarkable breakthrough in the eighteenth century, a crucial influence to the Taylorism and the early days of Scientific Administration, but is hardly the way to go if you believe you need to be nimble, agile and adaptive.