Bombardier
Canadian aerospace company that developed the C Series aircraft program then sold it to Airbus for effectively zero dollars in 2018.
Canadian aerospace company that developed the C Series aircraft program before selling it to Airbus in 2018 for effectively zero dollars. The Bombardier team had developed agile engineering practices - rapid prototyping, direct engineer-to-shop-floor communication, verbal approvals for low-risk changes - that enabled fast iteration on a young aircraft program.
Post-acquisition, these locally-adapted practices faced strong selection pressure as Airbus imposed its heavyweight processes designed for mature programs like the A320. The case demonstrates how practices adaptive in one environment (startup-like aircraft development) can be maladaptive when imposed on different contexts.
Key Leaders at Bombardier
Eric Yuan
Founder & CEO
yuan's direct involvement in engineering maintained founder effects in that domain, while departments without founder involvement (sales) were overwhelmed by migrant norms, demonstrated patient germination with slow growth before environmental shift
Key Facts
Bombardier Appears in 3 Chapters
Zoom recognized COVID-19 as mast year opportunity, compressing years of growth into 90 days by allocating heavily to infrastructure (100K+ customers/day).
Zoom's mast year allocation strategy →Zoom tripled headcount (2,500→7,700) during pandemic - 50-60% annual migration rate meant imported norms from Amazon/Google/Salesforce overwhelmed founder effects.
How rapid growth created gene flow at Zoom →Zoom illustrates 10-year dormancy pattern - founded 2011, steady growth 2013-2019 ($0→$622M), then COVID created light gap enabling explosive growth.
Zoom's 10-year germination →