Although I sometimes wonder how much survivor bias there is in these stories.
How many misfit teams failed?
Which is not to defend corporate hyper-control at all. But I suspect that knowing how often skunkworks projects work, and how success can be affected by different personalities and corporate contexts, might be useful information.
It is more complex than that. In some fields there was a culture of labs and special projects. IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox, and many other companies followed that route and there were corporations with a lot of bureaucracy.
How many misfit teams failed?
Which is not to defend corporate hyper-control at all. But I suspect that knowing how often skunkworks projects work, and how success can be affected by different personalities and corporate contexts, might be useful information.