There is always a push and pull between keeping companies as is, and moving forward towards innovation. In my experience, there has always been individuals that have been in place for so long that they lack the motivation to change. They have become experts in the current standards and processes that they prefer to stay the experts rather than allow an up and coming engineer excel and make a change in the company. However, with this mindset, there is the risk of stagnation. This is common in companies that have a successful product line and a good place in the market. They fail to see they could make innovations that would place them at the top of the market yet again.

In my company this has been the case for a long time but R&D has recently hired new engineers and this will hopefully break them out of this stagnation point.