Reviews for Business Marketing (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

The average rating for Business Marketing (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-04 00:00:00 Ronald Phillips Jr Much current research and popular commentary on business innovation has come to focus on the high technology start-up to generate new often internet-based families of products that strongly disrupt and even render obsolete traditional industries. A less understood area is how long established firms with established families of products and distinguished histories are attempting to transform themselves in the face of the demands of the digital age. This involves a different set of problems from innovation start-ups with potentially high risks, since these established firms have large business footprints and employ tens of thousands of people worldwide. In spite of the apparent lack of guidance, there is actually a lot of history on the efforts of technical companies to transform themselves. Indeed, the incredible growth of the information technology sector in response to the internet developed the way it did due to transformations at IBM from the 1960s that permitted whole sub industries to grow but innovating around modular components of broader IBM systems. There are other examples of transformation attempts by larger firms around this particular time frame, when technological change was accelerating along with the rise of strong global competitors in Europe and Japan. Margaret Graham's book "The Business of Research" is a fine history of a significant but ultimate failed innovation at RCA - the development of the VideoDisc system, which eventually lost out to emerging VCR technology and the subsequent innovations that drove VCRs away. The technological details are interesting but largely of historical interest now - although some of these units can still be obtained in eBay and other sights. The business conclusions are of more continuing interest, even if most large firms no longer organize their research and development technologies in large and centralized R&D divisions any longer. While RCA had product development capabilities geographically dispersed in several of its divisions, its principal capabilities were located at RCA labs, the organizational focus of a capability that developed over the course of its distinguished early history of innovation and new product development, although following WWII, the firm had difficulty adjusting to emerging non-governmental markets and had late-to-market and unprofitable efforts in computers and color television. Organizing R&D this was could be very successful in some specific product situations, such as when development focused on well understood products in established and stable industries. It was less successful when there was high uncertainty about the course of technological change or about the markets and customers that the innovative products were seen as addressing. The videodisc product embodied just this uncertainty. There are potential problems with organizing R&D and a centralized focus of action, especially in a large and diversified firm. To start with, R&D becomes a direct competitor with other divisions for discretionary budgetary flows. Normally, firms develop routines for comparing what different divisions are doing and how they are performing so that funds can be directed to their best uses. While there are lots of debates about how well these capital budgeting processes work in general, there is a distinct problem when R&D is included in the mix, since R&D does not function with the same time and performance metrics as the other divisions. Sales volumes will be lower and performance hurdles will be harder to project, due to the uncertainty involved. Not surprisingly, funding for R&D can be the subject of corporate politics, even though R&D success will be crucial for corporate and divisional continued performance. That is in the long run, however, while in the short run it can seem a zero sum game. One of the benefits of the internet based start-up boom is the reinvigoration of innovation financing via the venture capital business. Because of the potential for corporate life to be awash with bureaucratic politics, organizing R&D centrally also highlights the requirements for support from top managers if there is any hope for continuity in the development of complex long-term projects. Given the higher turnover of CEOs at the time, it is not surprising that top manager discontinuity ended up hurting the VideoDisc project. Related to the need for support from the top is the importance of linking R&D to corporate strategy for innovative firms. It has become nearly a truism for start-ups that the innovative product that firm puts on offer is, in effect, its strategy -- the firm will systematically make persistent profits on the basis of the strategy underlying its product launch. That was not always the case, however, and with a too centralized approach to managing R&D, the research unit develops products that may be useful to the parent firm but were not necessarily conceptualized or developed in terms of some specific strategic commitments by the parent. Rather, it will be a fortunate confluence of activities and results if the products support the strategy but hardly a necessary one. It is little wonder that many traditionally high performing large firms lost their innovativeness when they because distracted by excessive size and diversification and failed to continually review their mix of products and services in development and how that mix fit or failed to fit with their prior strategies. The centralization of R&D is less optimal as the nature of the innovation involved becomes more complex. By complex, I do not mean "technical" complexity. Most innovations are highly complex this way. Rather than that, "complex" innovations involves a wide ranging set of capabilities in order to bring them into existence and commercialize them successfully. There are first the details of the product in nits different versions. In addition, there is the knowledge and skills required to make an innovative product useful in a given situation -- the "development" part of research and development. In addition to this, there is the knowledge of how a product can be made to fit into a large set of products and actions - to see how the product affect the user overall and in the context of how the user works. For new products there are also questions about how the technology involved will evolve (and thus what partnership and licensing needs will be), how the markets and customer groups will evolve, and also how the organizational systems for making and sellling a product will evolve. To do this well with a major innovation requires that knowledge from many parties in the firm willl need to be tapped. It also suggests that different research projects will be better conducted in different organizational arrangements. Some projects might be best located in particular divisions. Others may need to connect fundamentally with managers of larger groups or even managers at corporate levels. Still other projects may be best organized as partnerships, either across a corporation or with other innovative firms possessing knowledge not currently available within the firm at the time of the project. All of these points are recognized to some degree today by innovation managers and consultants. They were not as clear in the 1970s and 1980s. Graham's book shows all of the relevant forces at work in the two decade project to develop the VideoDisc. It is especially noteworthy that this project, which could have succeeded actually failed. Most innovative projects fail and it is much better to learn from failures than from triumphal reviews of highly publicized successes. The book reads like a volume in a series focusing on economic and technical history - which it is. While the style is on the dry side, it is a very informative case and will worth the effort for someone working through these issues in a age of "digital transformations".

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-30 00:00:00 Jack Sallay Re-titling aside (the original title is RCA & the VideoDisc : The Business of Research), this is not really a book so much on the business side of research. It's there, but a bit tacked on at the end. What this is really is a history of research at RCA, and specifically the history (technical, marketing, and management) of the VideoDisc player. For some odd reason I've always been fascinated by the flopped device and this is a must read for anyone else with a strong curiosity on the player. It does a great job of covering the R&D to shipped product reaching all the way back to the 1930's.