Anytime a new competition shows up, some exploration makes it very apparent that they are exercising certain freedoms not accessible to the incumbents. One such freedom that I crave a lot is not having to benchmark rigidly on certain quality criteria.
When you don't have to measure and benchmark, you tend to rely more on the power of your vision and intuition to take things forward. You believe that the measurement, when done at the right time, will turn out in your favor. And that gets rid of a lot of baggage, speeding you up tremendously. Unfortunately that's not possible when you are ossified in a structure where trust has to be quantified all the time.
I believe transformative research wings within a company should be structured to utilize this freedom. You build a vision and start selling that, which is powerful enough to give you a foot in the door, then you build rest of the required complexities, and expand. Importantly, even during expansion, you are trusted to go on without much rigor. The alignment with vision is so strong that quantification of trust is pushed to the extreme right, making the more important portions of work happen at high pace.
Personally, I have been employing this no-need-to-measure-we-trust-the-vision freedom at work, but have recently inflicted many delays due to failure in doing so. Rigorous quantifications and benchmarking are extremely costly, not just from the systems-to-build angle, but in the sense that their frictive presence goes far enough to even impact motivations of the builders who hold a lot of deep rooted belief in the vision. Of course I am talking about risky moves, but that's exactly what strongly built and thought-out visions should help de-risk.