It might be as simple as this: Products have lifetimes. In the industrial age, starting a product was a big, expensive proposition. The easiest thing to do was to conflate the product with the company. Once the two were inexorably tied together, when the product lifetime came to an end, so eventually would the company. It would live for awhile on stored resources and thrash around trying to suddenly become innovative, but because that company's essential structure was built around that one product, eventually it would die.
Industrial age organizations can't untie themselves from their one successful product/product group, so they die.
If we can figure out how to decouple product from organization then all that collective knowledge won't get lost.
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