【分析解答题】

Don’’t laugh at gilded butterfliesPart

A、 The Gillette company’’s website flashes out a message to the e-visitor: "Innovation is Gillette", it claims. There are few big companies that would not like to make a similar claim; for they think innovation is a bit likeBotox — inject it in the right corporate places and improvements are bound to follow.But too many companies want one massive injection, one huge blockbuster, to last them for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, successful innovation is rarely like that.The latest manifestation of Gillette’’s innovative skill will appear in stores in NorthAmerica next month. The global leader in men’’s "grooming products" is rolling out a successor to its popular three-bladed Mach3 range. It will not, as comedians had long anticipated, be a four-bladed version. Rather, it will be the world’’s first vibrating "wet shave" blade. The battery-powered M3Power is designed to bounce around on your skin to give "a smoother, more comfortable shave".For a company that claims to embody innovation, this is less than earth-shattering. On the innovation scale it falls closer toBrooksBrothers’’ new stain-proof tie than to the video-cassette recorder or the digital camera—especially since there is a suspicion that Gillette may be keener to create synergy between its razor and its batteries division than it is to usher in a genuinely new male-grooming experience. Even in relatively zippy businesses like pharmaceuticals, genuinely new products are fewer and further between. Spending on pharmaceutical R&D、has doubled over the past decade, but the number of new drugs approved each year byAmerica’’s Food andDrugAdministration has halveD、Drug companies still live in the hope of finding a big winner that will keep their shareholders happy for a long time.But this focus means that many unglamorous, but potentially interesting, compounds may be bottled up in their laboratories.Part
B、 WilliamBaumol, a professor at New York University, argues that big companies have been learning important lessons from the history of innovation.Consider, for example, that in general they have both cut back and redirected their R&D、spending in recent years. Gone are the droves of white-coated scientists surrounded by managers in suits anxiously awaiting the next cry of "eureka". Microsoft is a rare exception, one of the few big companies still spending big bucks on employing top scientists in the way pioneered by firms such asAT&T (with itsBell Laboratories) and Xerox.This will prove to be a wise investment by Microsoft only if its scientists’’ output can be turned into profitable products or services.AT&T and Xerox, when in their heyday, managed to invent the transistor and the computer mouse; but they never made a penny out of them. Indeed, says Mr.Baumol, the record shows that small companies have dominated the introduction of new inventions and radical innovations — independent inventors come up with most of tomorrow’’s clever gizmos, often creating their own commercial ventures in the process. But big companies have shifted their efforts. Mr.Baumol reckons they have been forced by competition to focus on innovation as part of normal corporate activity. Rather than trying to make money from science, companies have turned R&D、into an "internal, bureaucratically driven process". Innovation by big companies has become a matter of incremental improvements within the processes that constitute daily operations.Pharmaceutical giants continue to get their hands on new science by buying small innovative firms, particularly in biotech. Toby Stuart, a professor at theColumbiaBusiness School in New York, thinks that this shows another change in the supply chain of invention. He says that many of the biotech firms are merely intermediating between the universities and "Big Pharma", the distributors and marketers of the fruits of academia’’s invention. Universities used to license