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Corporate immune system


The term corporate immune system, or corporate immune response, refers to a process within corporations that demands organizations within the company accomplish activities in a certain way, a form of conformity tendencies. It is, in effect, the active form of groupthink, when the past outcome of groupthink processes forces itself on organizations that are otherwise different.

The term is most commonly used to describe such processes that drive out innovation and entrepreneurial activity within organizations. This is often found within in large multi-divisional companies, where it manifests itself as inter-divisional fighting, often subtle or unintended. Multinational corporations are particularly common examples, as divisional differences can be compounded by different corporate structures, languages and even time zones.

The term may refer to any organizational process that tends to drive out differences, or alternately demands conformity. The name refers to parallels with biological immune systems, which attempt to drive out "foreign" invaders and sometimes react negatively against the organism it is supposed to protect:

The essence of the term is the activity of driving out differences, as opposed to the natural tendency to do so.

Within any corporation, managers are presented with new projects and have to gain funding and staffing resources to implement them. These projects may be organizational in nature, implementing a new sales and inventory system for instance, or product related, like manufacturing and marketing a new toy. The process of introducing and implementing new ideas is a well studied area of business theory.

At any point in time, any particular manager might be presented with several new ideas, and has to choose which among these to promote. Implementation carries with it certain risks, both outright failure of the initiative, or through opportunity costs when some other initiative is not carried out due to conflicting needs or lack of resources. In larger companies, many managers will present ideas that have to compete for larger pools of resources, as decided on by upper management. Corporations normally have well-defined procedures for assessing these proposals, in order to decide among the many concepts so the most rewarding and viable projects gain support.


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