硅谷跨行业抢饭碗，守成型企业如何应对？

    硅谷是颠覆性创新的心脏地带，是所谓的“独角兽型企业”（即估值10亿美元以上的创业公司）的天堂。提起硅谷，人们往往立即想起它遍地开花的网络公司，频繁的交通堵塞，还有硅谷企业对于犯错的高容忍性。但现在，硅谷的创业公司却开始以一种全新的方式和理由吸引了人们的注意。

    以往，很多蜂涌到硅谷参观学习的企业，都把它当成一次旅游，不过现在他们的学习态度要比过去严肃得多了。近年来，数字化、连通性和物联网的发展令很多守成型企业疲于追赶，而跑在潮流最前面的就是硅谷的创业公司。

    如今，随着创业公司纷纷闯入他们以前从未进入的领域，守成型企业正面临着一种日益严峻的挑战——我将其称为“短暂优势经济”。在这种经济中，以往的战略规则已经不再管用。

    我们过去理所当然地认为，最强大的竞争对手，必然是同行业内的其他公司，他们和我们瞄准的是同一批客户。比如卡特彼勒与日本小松、可口可乐与百事可乐、福特与通用汽车等等。

    但现在这个逻辑不再是铁的定律了。你的公司最厉害的竞争对手很可能来自其他行业，而且他们可能很快就会偷走你的客户。比如Lending Club和Wealthfront这两家公司分别颠覆了银行贷款和投资的传统模式。

    过去很多人认为，要想运作一家企业，并且为竞争对手的进入设置壁垒，最关键的是要拥有资产。但现在，最重要的已经不再是拥有资产，而是获得资产的渠道。

    比如，亚马逊的网络服务意味着以前买不起数据中心的企业，现在也可以根据自身需求购买到相应的服务。Box、Dropbox和Evernote等公司正在利用云架构提供文件存储和分享功能，从而使全新的工作与协作方式成为可能。

    学术界都知道，必须由企业协调的行为和可以在公开市场发生的行为，是存在区别的。当存在明显的不确定因素，当公开市场的交易成本较高，当参与者存在投机倾向，或者当不同的交易方存在信息不对称时，企业可以比公开市场更有效地完成工作。

    今天的许多知名创业公司已经用科技削弱了一些守成企业的有组织行为带来的优势。比如通过提供连接买家和卖家的平台，这些企业为一些过去因成本问题或可行性问题而没法达成的交易创造了市场。比如，ServiceNow公司的“平台即服务”功能，以前必须通过一名内部IT人员才能完成。

    除了短暂优势经济的兴起之外，我们还看到许多商业模式出现了“松绑”的趋势，一旦企业看到某家创业公司能够提供某项出色的功能，又不会夹带一些他们用不上的功能进行“捆绑销售”，企业就会越来越不愿为那些他们用不上的功能掏钱。不过很多传统的业务模式却面临着这样的困境：他们的业务模式旨在通过一系列行为，为部分客户提供某些价值；同时通过另一系列行为，为另一部分顾客提供其它价值（想想电视和广告或报纸和广告的关系）。但如果你给了客户选择的权利，他们往往只会选择对自己有价值的体验。

    如今有很多人到实体店里看产品，然后在网上以更便宜的价钱购买，也是这种挑战的一个例子。从商店的观点来看，提供商品展示空间，让客户有机会亲眼目睹产品，是一种旨在激发购买行为而进行的投资。面对这种局面，百思买选择了调整他们的目标顾客群，开始向制造商收取产品上架费用。虽然利润有所降低，但总比什么也不做好。

    那么，守成企业面对如此之大的变革，又应该做些什么？首先不要慌。如果你是一家大型的守成企业，那么你拥有的各种资产足以让创业公司流口水。你既有人才，又有网络、知识产权、现金和收益流。问题是，你怎样利用这些资产去探索未来，而不是捍卫过去？答案是要学会创新，不是偶尔，而是要持续不断地创新；不是仅仅实现现有业务的渐进式增长，而是要开辟显著增长的新机会。

    企业必须要高度重视创新驱动型增长。这意味着开发一种全新的工作方式。企业必须学会利用外部资产开发新的产品和服务，在适合创新的领域，要坚持既有的控制导向型规定和流程。另外，在守成企业勇敢探索新领域的过程中，无论迈出的第一步是成功还是失败了，都必须从中学习经验和教训。

    幸运的是，我们知道企业需要具备什么条件才能实现这些目标。它们是：设计思维，敏锐理解客户需求，愿意开发和试验原型产品，有一支专注的全职团队，领导层能够分辨出哪种做法适合今天的核心业务、哪种做法有益于企业明天的成功。（财富中文网）

    本文作者为哥伦比亚商学院的商业战略教授。

    译者：朴成奎

    审校：任文科

    Ah, Silicon Valley—the beating heart of disruptive innovation, home of the so-called Unicorns, those startups worth a billion dollars or more. Famous for its networks, its traffic jams, and its acceptance of failure, Silicon Valley startups are beginning to attract attention in a whole new way, and for a whole new set of reasons.

    Companies that once flocked to visit the region as a form of intellectual tourism are now taking those trips a lot more seriously. Digitization, increased connectivity, and the promise of the Internet of Things have well-established companies on the run, and Valley startups seem to be leading the charge.

    Established companies now have to cope with the increasing pace of what I call the transient advantage economy, with startups barging into spaces they could never enter before. In this economy, the old rules of strategy have simply stopped working.

    We used to accept as given that the most significant competitors to worry about were the other firms doing the same things we did, who were also competing for the same customers. It was Caterpillar vs. Komatsu, Coke vs. Pepsi, Ford vs. General Motors.

    That logic no longer holds. Your company’s most significant competitors may very well come from other industries, and they can steal your customers very quickly. For example, startups such as Lending Club and Wealthfront are picking apart the traditional model for bank loans and investing, respectively.

    The belief that owning assets is essential to operating a business and provides barriers to entry for competitors is crumbling. Today, access to assets, rather than ownership, is the key.

    Amazon’s web services offerings, for instance, mean that companies that never could have dreamed of affording a data center can buy the functional equivalent of one on an as-needed basis. New companies such as Box, Dropbox, and Evernote are using cloud-based infrastructure to offer document storage and sharing capabilities, making an entirely new way of working and collaborating possible.

    In academia, there is a well-worn distinction between activities that have to be coordinated by an organization and activities that can take place in an open market. An organization can offer a more effective way of getting work done when there is considerable uncertainty about what might happen; when transaction costs in the open market are high; when players have the temptation to behave opportunistically; and when there is information asymmetry between different trading partners.

    Many of today’s best-known startups have used technology to eliminate the benefits of organizing activities under one corporate roof. By providing platforms that connect buyers and sellers, these firms have created markets for transactions that would have been too expensive or simply not feasible in an earlier era. A company such as ServiceNow, for instance, offers to replace many of the functions that would once have been performed for a company by in-house IT personnel with its “platform as a service.”

    Alongside the rise of this transient advantage economy, we have seen a massive unbundling of business models, with customers becoming increasingly unwilling to pay for attributes they don’t want once a startup has shown them that they can avoid having to do so. The dilemma is that many traditional business models were based on offering value to a customer via one set of activities while capturing it for the company via another (think TV and commercials, or newspapers and advertising). Give a customer a choice, and they’ll often opt to consume only the experience they value.

    Showrooming, the practice of visiting stores to see an actual product but buying it more cheaply online, is one example of this challenge. From a store’s point of view, providing display space and the chance to physically see products is an attribute they invest in to reap the reward of purchases. When that went away, Best Buy, for instance, shifted their customer base and began to charge manufacturers to stock their shelves. Not as good as the profit margins on purchases, but better than nothing.

    So, what is an incumbent to do in the face of so much change? First, don’t panic. If you’re a big, established firm, you have all kinds of assets that would make a startup drool. You’ve got people, networks, intellectual property, cash, and revenue streams. The big question is, how do you use those assets to discover the future rather than trying to defend the past? It means learning to be innovative, not just now and again, but routinely, with the goal of finding not just incremental tweaks on your existing business but substantial new sources of growth.

    Innovation-driven growth needs to be taken seriously. That means developing a new way of working. Companies must use external resources to develop new products and services, maintain their existing control-oriented rules and procedures in parallel with those suitable for innovation, and they must learn lessons from subsequent successes and failures, quickly, as they venture into brave new areas.

    The good news is that we know what needs to be in a company’s toolkit to accomplish these goals: design thinking, a keen understanding of customer needs, the willingness to prototype and experiment, full-time focused teams, and leadership that can distinguish between the practices suitable for today’s core business and those that make sense for tomorrow.

    Rita Gunther McGrath is a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School