NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[kabunushi]

James Cannavino of IBM gave away all rights to PC OS to Bill Gates for an OS that Gates didn't even own at the time. Cannavino thought all the money would be in the hardware, didn't give a toss about the OS. Gates made the deal then had to hustle out and buy an OS as he secured positioning as the platform for MS Office and other software, a monopoly that made billions for Microsoft.

IBM storage division execs also slept while EMC came along and took away their monopolistic billion-dollar mainframe storage hardware business. Just to cite a couple of examples of astounding lack of foresight in different divisions of Big Blue.

I'm not claiming that NWBO can become a billion-dollar monopoly, only that it's very clear that incumbent huge franchises can be quite blind to entrepreneurial opportunities for innovations that appear directly in front of them.