阅读理解
Don''t laugh at gilded butterflies
Part A
The Gillette company''s website flashes out a message to the e-visitor: "Innovation is Gillette", it claims. There are few big companies that would not like to make a similar claim; for they think innovation is a bit like Botox — inject it in the right corporate places and improvements are bound to follow. But too many companies want one massive injection, one huge blockbuster, to last them for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, successful innovation is rarely like that.
The latest manifestation of Gillette''s innovative skill will appear in stores in North America next month. The global leader in men''s "grooming products" is rolling out a successor to its popular three-bladed Mach3 range. It will not, as comedians had long anticipated, be a four-bladed version. Rather, it will be the world''s first vibrating "wet shave" blade. The battery-powered M3Power is designed to bounce around on your skin to give "a smoother, more comfortable shave".
For a company that claims to embody innovation, this is less than earth-shattering. On the innovation scale it falls closer to Brooks Brothers'' new stain-proof tie than to the video-cassette recorder or the digital camera—especially since there is a suspicion that Gillette may be keener to create synergy between its razor and its batteries division than it is to usher in a genuinely new male-grooming experience.
Even in relatively zippy businesses like pharmaceuticals, genuinely new products are fewer and further between. Spending on pharmaceutical R&D has doubled over the past decade, but the number of new drugs approved each year by America''s Food and Drug Administration has halved. Drug companies still live in the hope of finding a big winner that will keep their shareholders happy for a long time. But this focus means that many unglamorous, but potentially interesting, compounds may be bottled up in their laboratories.
Part B
William Baumol, a professor at New York University, argues that big companies have been learning important lessons from the history of innovation. Consider, for example, that in general they have both cut back and redirected their R&D spending in recent years. Gone are the droves of white-coated scientists surrounded by managers in suits anxiously awaiting the next cry of "eureka". Microsoft is a rare exception, one of the few big companies still spending big bucks on employing top scientists in the way pioneered by firms such as AT&T (with its Bell Laboratories) and Xerox.
This will prove to be a wise investment by Microsoft only if its scientists'' output can be turned into profitable products or services. AT&T and Xerox, when in their heyday, managed to invent the transistor and the computer mouse; but they never made a penny out of them. Indeed, says Mr. Baumol, the record shows that small companies have dominated the introduction of new inventions and radical innovations — independent inventors come up with most of tomorrow''s clever gizmos, often creating their own commercial ventures in the process.
But big companies have shifted their efforts. Mr. Baumol reckons they have been forced by competition to focus on innovation as part of normal corporate activity. Rather than trying to make money from science, companies have turned R&D into an "internal, bureaucratically driven process". Innovation by big companies has become a matter of incremental improvements within the processes that constitute daily operations.
Pharmaceutical giants continue to get their hands on new science by buying small innovative firms, particularly in biotech. Toby Stuart, a professor at the Columbia Business School in New York, thinks that this shows another change in the supply chain of invention. He says that many of the biotech firms are merely intermediating between the universities and "Big Pharma", the distributors and marketers of the fruits of academia''s invention. Universities used to license their inventions to these firms direct, but small biotech companies make the process more efficient. They are well networked with the universities, in whose "business parks" they frequently locate their offices. They may not, of themselves, be very innovative.
Companies need to resist the feeling that it is not worth getting out of bed for anything other than a potential blockbuster. Product cycles are getting shorter and shorter across the board because innovations are more rapidly copied by competitors, pushing down margins and transforming today''s consumer sensation into tomorrow''s commonplace commodity. Firms have to innovate continuously and incrementally these days to lift products out of the slough of commoditization. After it used innovation to create a commoditized market for fast food, McDonald''s struggled before recently managing to reinvigorate its flow of innovations.
Part C
Another factor to take into account is the fragmentation of markets. Once uniform mass markets are breaking up into countless niches in which everything has to be customized for a small group of consumers. Looking for blockbusters in such a world is a daunting task. Vijay Vishwanath, a marketing specialist with Bain, a consulting firm, says that Gillette''s bouncy blade may yet end up as no more than a niche product — fine if it is profitable.
Mr. Chakravorti believes that the problem lies with the marketing of new innovations. It has not, he says, caught up with the way that consumers behave today. "Executives need to rethink the way they bring innovations to market. " Too many are still stuck with the strategies used to sell Kodak''s first cameras almost 120 years ago, when the product was so revolutionary that the company could forget about competition for at least a decade. Today, no innovation is an island. Each needs to take account of the network of products into which it is launched.
Companies that fail to come up with big new headline — hitting blockbusters should not despair. There are plenty of other, albeit less glamorous, areas where innovation can take place. Management thinkers have identified at least three. Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School of Management, says that the roots of America''s productivity surge lie in a "genuine revolution in how American companies are using information technology". Good companies are using IT "to reinvent their business processes from top to bottom".
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, patented or not, what Mr Hammer calls "operational innovation" can add to shareholder value. In an article in the April issue of the Harvard Business Review, he asks why so few companies have followed the examples of Dell, Toyota and Wal-Mart, three of the greatest creators of value in recent times. None of them has come up with a string of revolutionary new products. Where they have been creative is in their business processes.
Mr. Hammer, who was once a professor of computer science at MIT, believes that the best qualification for innovation is a basic training in engineering. Crucially, he says, engineers are taught that design matters; that most things are part of a system in which everything interacts; that their job is to worry about trade-offs; and that they must continually be measuring the robustness of the systems they set up. Such a frame of mind, he believes, fosters innovation. It may be no coincidence that many of the greatest corporate leaders in America, Europe and Japan, past and present, trained first as engineers.
Companies are being encouraged to embrace other forms of innovation too. In a recent issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review, Christopher Trimble and Vijay Govindarajan, two academics from Dartmouth College''s Tuck School of Business, recommend that they try a little "strategic innovation". The authors point to examples such as Southwest Airlines, a low-cost American regional carrier, and Tetra Pak, a Swedish company whose packaging products are handled at least once a day by most citizens of the western world. Such companies succeed, they say, "through innovative strategies alone, without much innovation in either the underlying technologies or the products and services sold to customers. "
Tetra Pak''s strategic innovation involved moving from the production of packages for its customers to the design of packaging solutions for them. Instead of delivering ready-made containers, the company increasingly provides the machinery for its customers to make their own packages: the fishing rod, not the fish.
Part D
In the book, "The Innovator''s Solution", published late last year, Mr. Christens en argued that established companies should try to become disruptive innovators themselves. He cites, for example, Charles Schwab, which turned itself from a traditional stockbroker into a leading online broker, and Intel, which reclaimed the low end of the semiconductor market with the launch of its Celeron chip.
There are, says Mr. Christensen, things that managers can do to make such innovations more likely to happen within their organizations. For example, projects with potential should be rapidly hived off into independent business units, away from the smothering influence of the status quo. The ultimate outcome of any one disruptive innovation may still be unpredictable; the process from which it emerges is not.
In the end, though, "no single innovation conveys lasting advantage," says Mr. Hammer. In the toys and games business today, up to 40% of all products on the market are less than one year old. Other sectors are only a little less pressured. Innovation and, yes, invention too, has to take place continually and systematically.
Questions 30 - 33
Below is a list of headings , choose the most suitable choices for parts (A-D) and write the appropriate numbers (i-iv) on your answer sheet.
NB: There are more headings than you need so you will not use all of them and you may use any heading more than once.
List of heading
i. Innovative lessons
ii. The dilemma solved?
iii. Finding a niche
iv. big companies should focus on making lots of small improvements rather than chasing wonderful new products