Watching Boeing's travails it is instructive to recall the Deming Institute case study Gunfire at Sea, the tale of how Percy Scott and William Sims revolutionized fire control at the dawn of the 20th century despite the best efforts of the RN and USN to thwart them.
A more modern example would be the invention of the modern UAV by the Airforce's Big Safari group in the late 1990s despite the bureaucracy's attempt to have them classified as ground launched cruise missiles prohibited under arms control.
Innovation requires organizational entrepreneurship as much as technical invention. Scott, Sims and Big Safari were regarded as crazy troublemakers. Fortunately for us they reveled in it.
