Actually, large organizations typically get that way by absorbing many small, medium and even large organizations. Indeed, many corporations find it easier to launch new initiatives this way instead of internally. It's faster and less risky. Conversely, when a project becomes a poor fit for whatever reason, it might get spun off as an entity for sale to another company. Example, SAIC went public and promptly fractured itself into many entities that it sold to other companies. A hybrid example, Lockheed spun off a division with the goal of it acquiring the larger Leidos, which now continues under the same name but with the top layer of management dominated by Lockheed spinoff managers.
You can easily and at just the cost of your time get a vast amount of data of this incessant acquisitions/spinnoffs churning from Crunchbase. Caveat: Crunchbase has many errors, almost as bad as Wikipedia. Its data gathering gives the impression of mostly being web scraping with minimal human oversight. But the upside is that using the unpaid version and doing some fact checking, you can avoid the staggering cost of the more accurate competitors, typically in the ballpark of $25K/seat.
Could this apply to the problem you have highlighted of EA having few but large sources of money fed to many small organizations? Large donors could make this happen by conditioning grants variously on mergers, spinoffs, or spinoff/merger hybrids.
Actually, large organizations typically get that way by absorbing many small, medium and even large organizations. Indeed, many corporations find it easier to launch new initiatives this way instead of internally. It's faster and less risky. Conversely, when a project becomes a poor fit for whatever reason, it might get spun off as an entity for sale to another company. Example, SAIC went public and promptly fractured itself into many entities that it sold to other companies. A hybrid example, Lockheed spun off a division with the goal of it acquiring the larger Leidos, which now continues under the same name but with the top layer of management dominated by Lockheed spinoff managers.
You can easily and at just the cost of your time get a vast amount of data of this incessant acquisitions/spinnoffs churning from Crunchbase. Caveat: Crunchbase has many errors, almost as bad as Wikipedia. Its data gathering gives the impression of mostly being web scraping with minimal human oversight. But the upside is that using the unpaid version and doing some fact checking, you can avoid the staggering cost of the more accurate competitors, typically in the ballpark of $25K/seat.
Could this apply to the problem you have highlighted of EA having few but large sources of money fed to many small organizations? Large donors could make this happen by conditioning grants variously on mergers, spinoffs, or spinoff/merger hybrids.