Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The challenge of organic growth
- 2 Profitable growth at Siemens Medical Solutions
- 3 UPS: Brown's organic growth story
- 4 Execution: making growth happen at The Home Depot
- 5 SYSCO: how has it achieved thirty-four years of continued growth?
- 6 Strategic position, organic growth, and financial performance
- 7 Defining and measuring organic growth
- 8 The make or buy growth decision: strategic entrepreneurship versus acquisitions
- 9 The misunderstood role of the middle manager in driving successful growth programs
- 10 Organic growth through internal corporate ventures
- 11 Linking customer management efforts to growth and profitability
- 12 Harnessing knowledge resources for increasing returns: scalable structuration at Infosys Technologies
- 13 Stay tuned: knowledge brokering via inter-firm collaboration in satellite radio
- 14 New directions for the study of organizational growth
- Index
- References
13 - Stay tuned: knowledge brokering via inter-firm collaboration in satellite radio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The challenge of organic growth
- 2 Profitable growth at Siemens Medical Solutions
- 3 UPS: Brown's organic growth story
- 4 Execution: making growth happen at The Home Depot
- 5 SYSCO: how has it achieved thirty-four years of continued growth?
- 6 Strategic position, organic growth, and financial performance
- 7 Defining and measuring organic growth
- 8 The make or buy growth decision: strategic entrepreneurship versus acquisitions
- 9 The misunderstood role of the middle manager in driving successful growth programs
- 10 Organic growth through internal corporate ventures
- 11 Linking customer management efforts to growth and profitability
- 12 Harnessing knowledge resources for increasing returns: scalable structuration at Infosys Technologies
- 13 Stay tuned: knowledge brokering via inter-firm collaboration in satellite radio
- 14 New directions for the study of organizational growth
- Index
- References
Summary
In dynamic business environments, opportunities often arise faster than entrenched players can form a response. Many organizations have been taken by surprise, unable to see or anticipate new opportunities. For instance, in 1876 William Orton of the Western Union Telegraph Company rejected an offer by Alexander Graham Bell to sell his telephone patents because Western Union could not envision how the telephone would be successful. From 1974 to 1984 the Swiss watch industry lost 30% of the world export market because it was unable to recognize the merits of quartz and electronic technology (Glasmeier, 1991). By 1979, Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had developed graphical user interfaces, mice, windows and pull down menus, laser printing, distributed computing, and Ethernet, but Xerox failed to exploit these innovations because of management's preoccupation with Japan's encroachment on its core copier business (Port, 1997). UPS, Emery Air Freight, and USPS each considered the idea of an overnight delivery service like that of FedEx, but rejected the concept because they could not foresee a market need (Collins & Lazier, 1992).
In hindsight, it is easy to dismiss these unfortunate business decisions as irrational or even incompetent. Such arguments recognize the competency traps faced by established firms: that despite longer-term returns, most firms are unable to overcome (or see beyond) the short-term costs of adopting new technologies and pursuing new strategies (Christensen, 1997; Leonard-Barton, 1992; March, 1991). The Swiss watchmakers had been building watches the same way for centuries.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Search for Organic Growth , pp. 244 - 270Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006