Limits to growing customer value: Being squeezed between the past and the future

Marketing managers often have to balance between marketing exploitation strategies (reaping value from what already is known) and marketing exploration strategies (reaping value from new sources). However, do marketing strategies once exploited or explored in a certain way or direction leave enough potential for further exploration? Based on the various cases of Apple, Alpro, Intel, Nutella, Patagonia, and Ryanair, this article shows that several risks and limits come into play when trying to answer this question. Companies may get squeezed between the past and the future while facing the pressure of temporal consistency driven by past behavior and experiencing the limits of future growth in the dominant customer value drivers. To counter this problem, companies often start integrating new value drivers in their story, leading to other risks, such as incompatibility with existing drivers. The cases discussed in this article reveal that companies may have to accept more sacrifices in order to increase returns within their growth trajectory. Value engineering will become a crucial discipline for companies to survive in many industries. This article gives a step-by-step approach on how to implement this in an organization.     

Exploitation versus exploration in multinational firms: Implications for the future of international business

Given the economic weight of multinational corporations and their privileged access to resources, many different scenarios can be built about the future of international business and about the future impact of international business on economic, technological, and social development. In this paper, we argue that multinationals do not form a uniform organisational population, and we provide empirical evidence of the existence of traditional, rigid entities seeking benefits from low-risk exploitative strategies on one hand, and of flexible multinationals seeking higher performance levels by balancing the trade-offs between exploration and exploitation on the other hand. As these two sub-populations compete with one another for resources, we use a population ecology perspective to study likely ecological scenarios for the future. Our conclusion is that traditional multinationals tend to prevail over flexible multinationals, and the conditions required for a future society to allow a genuine growth of flexible multinationals are unlikely. This implies that multinationals remain primarily exploitative, and that as such, they will only be associated with marginal economic, technological, and social developments in the future. Other organisational forms, such as entrepreneurial small business and communities of practices are shown to be much more likely vehicles through which society can progress and innovate.     

广义“资源诅咒”在我国省域尺度的案例检验——以新疆为例

近年来越来越多的国内学者认为，我国省域范围内存在“资源诅咒”现象。更有学者提出广义“资源诅咒”概念，认为我国省域乃至更小的地域尺度上更易发生广义“资源诅咒”。本文以新疆为案例，通过新疆矿产资源开发中已呈现的资源核效应、单一的产业结构、环境污染、生态破坏、粗放浪费、寻租违规等现象论证广义“资源诅咒”特征在新疆已经表现较为明显。     

科学审视计生工作新形势探索计生工作新思路

人口问题历来是影响社会发展的重要因素,关系到现代化建设的全局。目前人口发展呈现出前所未有的复杂局面,违法生育屡见不鲜,失业人员多,流动人口多等等。形式不乐观。我们一要认清形势,二要探索计生工作的新思路。三要开拓计生工作的新局面。     

金融信息服务领域运营工业化的探索

本文通过剖析中国银联在精益六西格玛方面的实践,指出六西格玛在金融信息服务领域工业化和信息化方面所起的关键作用。     

关于推进我国社会保障制度建设的探讨

实现和谐发展是人类共同的理想与追求目标,而社会保障是实现社会和谐发展的客观基础与必要条件,它的独特功能决定了它是实现社会公平正义与促进共享国民财富的基本制度安排。健全、完善社会保障制度是促进社会和谐发展的必由之路。本文旨在按照完善社会保障制度要求,在关注民生、实现社会公平正义,构建社会主义和谐社会保障制度方面做一些积极的探索。     

Strategic Responses to Advances in Seismic Technology in the Petroleum Industry

The world petroleum industry has been revolutionized by a change in exploration technology from two‐dimensional (2D) to three‐dimensional (3D) seismic mapping. One of the main effects of the newer technology has been to decrease the cost of finding oil, particularly in offshore fields. We examine the impact of the new technology on the exploration activities of the major international petroleum companies and find that they have aggressively increased petroleum exploration expenditures. As a result, we suggest that the companies have achieved a prisoner's dilemma outcome, where they are collectively worse off in terms of profits, providing a possible explanation for the recent wave of large‐scale mergers in the industry.     

Market discovery and the international expansion of the firm

The objective of this paper is to formulate a theoretical framework for studies of antecedents and consequences of discoveries during international expansion. By introducing market discovery it seems to be possible to offer a richer understanding of the pattern and pace of the international expansion of a firm. Market discovery is the result of both exploration and exploitation activities, but in order to exploit market discovery, a firm must learn to handle the discovered opportunity. A discovery, usually made while a firm is conducting daily activities, occurs in connection with search, planning, routine, and improvisation. The resulting learning can lead to changes in pace, orientation, and extension of the international expansion of the firm.     

引黄工程北干线支北01号隧洞段工程地质,水文地质问题分析

北干线０１＃隧洞段开工以来，隧洞涌水量大一直困扰着施工的顺利进行。结合前期勘察资料、施工地质编录资料以及施工现场多次调查，认为１＃、２＃斜井近年来该区域地下水位抬升，三个断层带涌水是造成１＃、２＃斜井开挖洞段被淹的主要原因。并提出在地下水比较丰富的洞段，应遵循开挖后紧跟衬砌，必要时对隧洞围岩进行灌浆，在大量涌水的断裂构造带，应进行超前探测，必要时进行超前灌浆封堵措施等建议。