迈克尔. 波特的“集成创新”

武夷山

Marketing Intelligence and Planning（市场情报与规划）杂志2006年第1期发表英国市场学资深学者Michael J. Baker的文章，The lessons of history（历史的教训）。文章说：

迈克尔. 波特的竞争力概念，其实直接源自以下旧内容：产业经济学的子领域，“市场结构”、“行为”和“绩效”等概念。只是由于波特巧妙的再包装、再定位（repositioning）和再循环，而且其论文又是发表在《哈佛商业评论》杂志上（该刊被许多工商管理学院列为“一类”期刊――“Category  1”，即档次最高的期刊），才对市场和经营实践产生了如此深远的影响。

博主：波特“竞争力”五力模型的成功，其实是“集成创新”的一个例子。

原文如下（http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0263-4503&volume=24&issue=1&articleid=1537357&show=html&PHPSESSID=5i7i8l9o0nerh2ad5dqqr9lbn6）：

The Authors

Michael J. Baker, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

Abstract

Purpose – To examine the lessons that may be learned by both academics and practitioners from a dispassionate review of the history of the marketing profession.

Design/methodology/approach – One of the founding fathers of marketing as a subject for academic study in the UK thinks aloud about what he has observed during more than 30 years in a leading UK business school.

Findings – The conclusion is that marketing academics exhibit one negative feature of scholarship: failure to take the historical perspective. A mutated variety of the notorious “marketing myopia” causes them to disregard anything written in what they regard as the distant past, and, therefore, to fail to see the larger picture.

Research limitations/implications – Academic researchers in marketing need to look for more basic principles and better rules of thumb, rather than esoteric irrrelevances fit only to grace the pages of the Journal of Obscurity.

Practical implications – If academics thus take a narrow and currently fashionable view, future marketing strategists, at present their students in graduate business schools, will in all probability do likewise.

Originality/value – A “viewpoint” from a privileged vantage point on the high ground.

Article Type:

Viewpoint

Keyword(s):

Research; Marketing management; History.

Journal:

Marketing Intelligence & Planning

Volume:

24

Number:

1

Year:

2006

pp:

7-14

Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

0263-4503

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana

An invitation to contribute a paper to a well-known and influential marketing journal that appeals to both academics and practitioners is irresistible – especially when the editor says you can address whatever theme appeals to you provided that it is likely to be of interest to the intended audience, and has the potential to stimulate debate.

It is now over 40 years since I secured my first academic appointment following three years at Durham University, two years National Service in the Royal Artillery, and six years selling flat rolled steel products. Initially it was intended as a break while I considered my options for a career in business but, after a few months at the chalk face, I decided that seeking to persuade others of the importance and relevance of marketing offered a more challenging and satisfying vocation. The rest, as they say, is history. And it is history that is the basic theme of this paper – not my history, but my perception of the failings of the marketing profession – both practitioners and academics – to take sufficient cognisance of the lessons that may be learned from it.

While this is not a new theme for me, and much of the content of this paper has been aired before, it is felt that it qualifies as a “new product” in the fifth category identified by Hall (1991) as the “Three Rs” – repackaged, repositioned and recycled. Hopefully, by doing so it may achieve the status proposed by Kerrington (2005), when using Hall's categories to classify genres of film, as a “Blockbuster”.

Research myopia

In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was much talk about marketing's mid-life crisis. One outcome of this concern was reflected in the call for papers for the AMA's 1994 Winter Educators Conference whose organisers set the theme as “Renaissance in Marketing Thought and Practice” and observed:

The ongoing interplay of marketing theory and practice has led to several new research areas. As a field our agenda now features topics such as relationship marketing, strategic alliances, managing brand equity, total quality management and market oriented management, among others.

The emergence of such topics raises at least two provocative issues for marketing scholars. First, are we reinventing the wheel? Even though the general topic headings may be new, how new are the specific research questions related to each area? … Second, interest in many of these emerging topics extends beyond the traditional domain of marketing. Unfortunately, interdisciplinary collaboration in the conduct of research in marketing is rare.

I had expressed a similar view in an editorial for the Journal of Marketing Management (vol 9.2 in 1993):

As a confirmed supporter of the concept of the product life cycle (PLC) it is interesting to speculate on its application to the study of marketing as a business discipline. While the establishment of the first chair in the subject can be dated to the 1880s most will agree that marketing only really took off in the mid-1950s to early 1960s with a number of seminal contributions by authors such as Peter Drucker, Joel Dean, Ted Levitt and Eugene McCarthy. Since that time the number of students opting to study the subject at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels have accelerated rapidly and resulted in a significant expansion in the number of academics researching and teaching the subject.

The question is, however, at what stage will growth begin to slow and the ‘market’ approach saturation and maturity? The question is prompted not by concern with the quality of contributions to JMM but a more broadly based awareness that research and publication in marketing might be approaching a plateau. Two factors prompt this observation. The first is the decline in the incremental value added by current research/publication. The second is the trend towards increasing marketing's domain to the point when it will subsume other fields whose practitioners might legitimately consider to be quite distinct from marketing.

The decline in incremental value added is noticeable everywhere. To a marked degree it is fuelled by the feeling that one should only cite the latest work relating to one's topic. As a result earlier pathbreaking and insightful contributions tend to be overlooked or ignored, and much of what passes for original work is a weak replication of seminal contributions published 30 or 40 years ago. The extension of marketing's domain is apparent in the flurry of publications about internal marketing and relationship marketing. To an old-fashioned marketer like myself much of this writing gives a distinct impression that the authors have just discovered the subject of human resource management, and concepts such as motivation and leadership. While I am all for this, I'm not sure we are not doing marketing a disservice if we seek to take over rather than integrate these concepts. Either way, both phenomena are symptomatic of the “hunting” behaviour observed in biological life cycles when an organism encounters a limit to growth and searches frantically for a means to get round it.

Perhaps it is a symptom of advancing years that what is regarded as history by a new generation was an important element in the education and experience of the old. For the old generation nostalgia and resistance to change may cause them to cling to the old-fashioned and outmoded ways of yesteryear. For the new generation a desire to think for themselves and make their own impact on the affairs of the world may lead them to overlook, or, worse still, ignore, hard-won lessons of the past.

Will our concern for recency (no citation more than ten years old is worth citing – possibly true for much of the physical sciences) blur our vision of what is relevant? Ignoring the past will we reinvent what is already known or, by taking cognisance of the past, will we see a renaissance in marketing theory and practice which properly reflects our rich inheritance?

If these indictments are correct, then the relevance of much of what we do must be called into question also. If productivity, on which academic recognition and preferment are judged, is to be measured in terms of frequency and recency rather than quality and importance then the proliferation of trivia can only gather momentum to the neglect of true knowledge.

Task specialisation and the Research Assessment Exercise

Not only in the UK, but also elsewhere, this tendency has unfortunately been exaggerated out of all proportion by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) which, like any other form of excess, has served only to distort the system it is intended to improve.

In the good, old, pre-RAE days most of us knew where we stood. There were universities, polytechnics, colleges of higher education and so on. Each category of institution had a clear understanding of its mission, with the universities emphasising research and scholarship, and the others the dissemination and practical application of the body of knowledge that resulted from such research and scholarship. Of course, this distinction did not preclude teaching in universities, nor research in other kinds of higher education establishments, but it did ensure that both academics and students could gravitate to the kind of institution that best served their needs. And, of course, individual institutions in each “category” could vary the emphasis given to either teaching or research according to their own perception of the kind of institution they wished to be. So research led institutions tend to emphasise basic or “academic” research, while the rest are more concerned with “applied” research.

The RAE has changed all that without actually changing anything at all, except to waste a great deal of time and money. While it may not be obligatory to make a submission of one's research output to the RAE, the senior management of virtually every kind of “eligible” institution believes it necessary to do so. And, in order to be able to do so, it is necessary to get individuals to be able to cite four publications, and the diversion of a great deal of academic time and effort to this end. Unsurprisingly, this huge increase in output has led to the establishment of a plethora of new journals; to many of the established journals increasing their size and frequency of publication; and the appearance of many papers that formerly would not have been accepted.

Now, many of the papers in the new journals are of a high quality and clearly add to our knowledge of marketing theory and practice. They also reflect the growth and development of the domain of marketing, and the increasing number of persons who are interested and involved in it. For marketing as a whole this is definitely a benefit and would probably have occurred without the RAE. But, in terms of the original object of the RAE exercise, it is irrelevant.

The purpose of the RAE is to encourage research output by offering financial rewards to those who meet certain, supposedly objective, criteria. However, the sum of money is fixed so its allocation is governed by rank ordering the competitors. Unlike the Olympics, there are no fixed qualifying standards for entry, so you can submit any publications you like. That is when the problems begin because the Judges will not blind review the papers to assess them on their intrinsic merits (whatever they may say), they will rank order them according to the perceived ranking of the journals in which they have been published. While a Journal's reputation is a good indicator of a paper's quality, it is by no means a sufficient one. The problem is compounded when the top ranked journals tend to be the longest established – which means American – therefore, have a distinct bias towards the American school of thought, and have not increased their size or frequency of publication in recent years to reflect the enormous growth in the global community of marketing academics. They also emphasise academic rather than applied research. Obviously, such journals can cherry-pick excellent papers, but it does not mean that work published elsewhere is necessarily inferior in quality. Indeed there is an argument that says that the established journals are more likely to overlook or reject work that challenges the accepted orthodoxy than are less well-known journals. And this possibility is often sufficient to deter new researchers from attempting to publish in notoriously difficult journals with lead times of up to four years.

However, my real concern about the RAE is that the insistence that everyone should attempt to publish four papers within the prescribed time frame is diverting resources – especially staff time – from equally important tasks such as curriculum development and innovative teaching practices. Further, this insistence that people attempt to become “jacks of all trades” flies in the face of economic reason. Throughout human history increased productivity and higher quality have been the result of task specialisation, and, while I have not undertaken a content analysis to confirm my hypothesis, I suspect that the Pareto Principle applies to research and publication. In other words 80 per cent of useful and influential research is attributable to 20 per cent of those doing it. I also suspect that, as in previous rounds, 80 per cent or more of the money to be allocated will go to the top 20 per cent of schools and the others will get very little if anything.

Recency

Another theme that I have addressed often with little noticeable effect is the issue of “recency” – the tendency only to cite authorities who have commented upon a subject within the last few years (almost always post-2000 now). An invitation to address an international conference with the theme “Emerging Economies” at the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedebad in January 2005 offered the opportunity to revisit this preoccupation. Given that most of the contributions were concerned with what Indian managers should do given accelerating growth rates in their economy, it seemed sensible to me to point out that while this may be a new phenomenon for them it was not new in any absolute sense given that every advanced economy was once an emergent economy. In other words, as Rostow's (1962) The Process of Economic Growth makes clear, there is a well documented theory of the stages of development through which economies pass, and it would seem prudent to learn from the experience of those countries that have successfully achieved “take-off” rather than re-conceptualise the problem from first principles. But practitioners are not alone in this – academics are equally as guilty of similar amnesia.

One of my publishers tells me that it is now necessary to bring out a revised edition of a mainstream marketing textbook every three years. If one considers the incidence of significant changes in theory and practice then, clearly, this cannot be the cause and one is left to conclude that the only compelling reason is “recency”. The book is less than three years old, so it must be up-to-date! This phenomenon is particularly marked in academic journals, accompanied by a tendency to recite anything and everything that might be remotely connected to the subject of inquiry to the point that soon the number of pages given to the references will exceed those devoted to the text itself. Such a proclivity is akin to the manner in which self-made men of limited education establish extensive libraries in which the primary criteria are quantity and appearance – buying books by the yard, in fine bindings and co-ordinated colours. “Fine feathers make fine birds.”

In English Proverbs Explained (Pan Books, 1967) Ronald Widout and Clifford Whitting observed that: “the chaffinch is much more colourful and attractive than a house sparrow, yet they are of the same family; they are both finches, and without their feathers they would be identical in appearance”. The message is that while appearances may influence our first impression they should not encourage us to draw erroneous conclusions, e.g. that chaffinches are radically different from house sparrows. Or, to quote another proverb, “Beauty is but skin deep” – a pleasing appearance may hide an ugly nature, or complete ignorance of the content of the library.

So is this polemic (“a verbal attack on a belief or opinion”) prompted by advanced years, a tendency to live in the past, and ignorance of current thinking and ideas? Possibly, but I hope not. As an editor, and member of numerous editorial boards, I am invited to read too many modern articles to be much out of date. My concern is that what I have termed “research myopia” leads younger scholars to overlook or ignore all the seminal contributions of earlier generations on which the foundations of modern marketing thought are built. In doing so they lose sight of the knowledge and insight accumulated over many years in other social sciences like economics, psychology and sociology which the marketing discipline seeks to integrate into a holistic explanation and interpretation of human consumption and exchange behaviour.

When Newton said “If I can see further it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants” he was acknowledging his debt to all the scholars who had preceded him. But Newton, 1642-1727 (not very recent) was propounding completely new theories that represented a major breakthrough in our understanding. In addition to discovering the binomial theorem, differential and integrated calculus, and that white light is composed of many colours, he also developed the three standard laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation. Unless and until these propositions/theories are falsified (the central tenet of positivism) physicists and others will continue to accept their validity and build upon the insight they provide. Thus science proceeds by a process of accumulation, most of which is incremental, until the next major discontinuity or breakthrough occurs, initiating a new cycle of evolutionary refinement.

But as Luecke (1993) pointed out in his book, Scuttle Your Ships Before Advancing, social scientists seem to be unwilling (unable) to agree a common start point representing what we believe we know so that we may advance from a well-established base to explore what we do not know. As a result the social sciences appeared to be doomed, like the Marie Céleste, to drift aimlessly, continually revisiting the same issues and reinventing themselves.

What is needed is a better appreciation of the past and the origins of our discipline. While it may be asking too much to agree laws and axioms of the kind that underpin the physical sciences, it should not be beyond our ability to develop what in my time at Harvard Business School in the late 1960s we called CUGs – currently useful generalisations. Generalisation is usually seen as the third step in the creation of knowledge following observation and classification. While it may lack the precision and authority of an axiom, law or principle it is usually sufficient to be used as a basis for decision-making and action. All the more so if it is current and useful. By the same token, if it ceases to be useful, or is overtaken by an improved and more up-to-date version, rejecting a CUG does not call for the same burden of proof as does the falsification of a law.

Accordingly, we should not automatically discard an argument or piece of research because its foundations are 10, 20, 30 years old or more. What we need to establish is whether more recent work has improved or invalidated the original authority and, if so, how. Further, unless we can come up with a convincing rejection of the earlier work, then we should restate its value and importance if for no other reason than that the original articulation of an insight or idea is often simpler and clearer than later versions of it. (If you look at papers in the Journal of Marketing in the 1950s and 1960s you will find most are short and contain few if any references!) Also, incrementalism, without reference back to the original, can result, over time, in a radical distortion and misrepresentation of what the original authority actually said. If you really want to know what Wendell Smith said about differentiation and market segmentation as alternative strategies you would be better advised to read his article in the Journal of Marketing, July 1956 (which contains no references at all) than Blomquist's (2004) version based on Smith (2003) and Jones (2002) not to mention Uncle Tom Cobleigh (2001).

Being aware of the past does not require one to live in it. But as Santayana observed “He who is unaware of history is bound to repeat it”. To avoid this, revisit the older literature of marketing: it only dates back a century or so. Equally, important, review the state-of-the-art, i.e. as represented by authoritative introductory textbooks in the cognate disciplines synthesised by marketing. You might be very surprised by how much you will learn.

What is called for is a renaissance in marketing thinking and research. This was the theme of the AMA Winter Educators Conference in 1994 but, in the time since we first aired these ideas at that conference, there has been no significant evidence of a willingness to revisit the marketing classics of the 1950s and early 1960s which influenced and challenged the senior scholars at the top of the profession today. In revisiting these earlier classics it would also seem to be appropriate that we reaffirm that marketing, like architecture, engineering and medicine is a synthetic discipline which draws upon contributions from many other disciplines and integrates these into a body of knowledge which is relevant to a craft or professional practice. Unlike many of the core disciplines, such as economics, psychology and sociology, on which it draws, marketing cannot afford to become enmeshed in a scientific rigour that requires one to control or assume away the complexity which is the real world of practice. As with architecture, engineering and medicine the acid test should be “does it work?”. What we need are more basic principles and rules of thumb, and fewer esoteric irrelevancies which are fit only to grace the pages of the Journal of Obscurity.

From the evidence presented there can be little doubt that most marketing scholars are guilty of research myopia in that they fail to consider earlier research within their own discipline, parallel research activity by scholars in other geographical areas, and complementary research by scholars in other disciplines. In large measure, the failure to consider earlier research is attributable to a preoccupation with recency – an emphasis upon work which has appeared usually within five years of one's own publication. It seems inevitable, therefore, that we will frequently be guilty of reinvention. For example, a major preoccupation of marketers in recent years has been “time to market”. Robert Weigand addressed this very topic in the Journal of Marketing in 1962, but is seldom if ever cited. The importance of parallel processing, concurrent engineering, and simultaneity are seen as vital, but few researchers appear to be aware of the PERT and CPA techniques first articulated in the late 1950s. Competitiveness is of central concern to us all, but how many readers are aware of, let alone have consulted the Carter and Williams (1959) analysis of the characteristics of technically progressive firms?

At the AMA Conference referred to earlier, I was the first academic not based in the USA to be invited to give a Keynote address. In pursuing my argument about research myopia I incurred the disapproval of some of the participants when I pointed out that Fred Webster had not “discovered” relationship marketing which was a central theme of his seminal paper “The Changing Role of Marketing in the Corporation”. Now this was and is a great paper, but it does not change the fact that the Scandinavian School had first begun to research the topic in the 1930s, and that in the 1970s and 1980s the IMP Group had extended ideas about relationships into work about interaction and networks. Webster's (1992) achievement through his paper in the Journal of Marketing was to bring the concept to the attention of a much wider audience with great clarity and impact. Similarly, Michael Porter's ideas on competitiveness are a direct descendant of the sub-field of Industrial Economics and the concepts of market structure, conduct and performance, but the influence of these ideas on marketing and business practice are almost entirely due to Porter repackaging, repositioning and recycling them through articles in the Harvard Business Review (a Category 1 publication that has increased its frequency of publication).

And so we could go on.

Finally, in creating our vision of the future perhaps what we need most of all is a greater awareness of our past. Business history and the works of the political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should be required reading for us all.

References

Baker, M.J. (1993), "Editorial", Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 9.2.

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Carter, C.F., Williams, B.R. (1959), "The characteristics of technically progressive firms", Journal of Industrial Economics, March, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Hall, T. (1991), Bringing New Products to Market, Amacom, New York, NY, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Kerrington, F. (2005), "Evaluating the impact of an integrated supply chain on the process of marketing European feature films", University of Hertfordshire, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Luecke, R. (1993), Scuttle Your Ships Before Advancing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Rostow, W.W. (1962), The Process of Economic Growth, 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Webster, F. (1992), "The changing role of marketing in the corporation", Journal of Marketing, Vol. 56.

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]

Widout, R., Whitting, C. (1967), English Proverbs Explained, Pan Books, London, .

[Manual request] [Infotrieve]