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For many established companies, becoming more effective marketers is a matter of fine tuning—increasing expenditures on promotion and advertising or reorganizing the sales force. For high-technology companies, becoming effective marketers is often a matter of starting from scratch. Such companies typically derive their initial strength from the innovations provided by the research and development function. In the midst of a chaotic and fast-changing competitive environment, the importance of research and development cannot be overestimated. As the competitive environment becomes more orderly, the marketing function becomes important for high-technology companies.

The authors contend that high-technology companies can make a successful transition from being innovation-driven to being market-driven only by effectively linking the R&D and marketing efforts. Such linkages can take any number of forms, from special committees to close contact by key officials at all levels of product development, testing, research, and selling. Regardless of what specific form the linkages take, high-technology companies must be on guard to prevent animosity from creeping into marketing-R&D relationship.

High-technology companies often have research and development capabilities superior to those of competitors, yet achieve only mediocre commercial success or fail completely. Are such companies simply in need of improved marketing skills? Not necessarily. Rather, they need to link R&D with marketing.

R&D or marketing prowess taken singularly, or even coexisting in the same organization, will not necessarily translate into financial success. Companies that appropriately link the two areas, though, can effectively anticipate, analyze, and exploit market opportunities. This article suggests how managers can forge such a linkage.

What Sets High Technology Apart?

High-tech industries tend to be volatile at best, and as seen in the semiconductor, microcomputer, and robotics fields, a sorting-out of competition occurs quickly compared to less technology-intense endeavors. Several examples offer evidence of the ways revolutionary changes can occur in high technology.

Five years ago, a robotics trade show could have been held in a closet. Since then, the industry has grown to include dozens of competitors catering to a fast-growing and potentially huge market. Only recently have microcomputer companies begun to compete with one another on the basis of marketing skills and savvy. Before this industry's shakeout began, technological capability was the main success criteria; technological expertise and reputation carried Texas Instruments (TI) along for several years in home computers. Yet, once sophisticated marketing abilities became indispensable in the home computer market, companies dependent mostly on technological strengths were no match for IBM, Apple, and others. TI eventually withdrew from the home computer market in the face of sizable monetary losses. (It had suffered a similar fate some years before in digital watches.) Other market casualties in the infant home computer industry already include Panasonic, Tomy Corporation, Mattel, and Timex. Turbulence of this kind makes high-technology competition different from that in most other businesses.

One way to improve understanding of high-tech markets is to divide them into either supply-side or demand-side markets. In the former, technological progress is literally creating markets and demand. In this supply-side stage of market development, marketing strategy is highly entrepreneurial—formulated on sketchy market information and on intuition. The remarks of Akio Morita, CEO of Sony Corporation, typify the marketing philosophy of a prototype supply-side thinker.

"The newer and more innovative a product is, the more likely it is that the public might not appreciate it at the beginning. In 1950, our company marketed a tape recorder. Despite the fact that it was a great achievement and a technological innovation for us, at the time it looked like a toy to the general public. Nobody thought about recording speeches or using a tape recorder to learn languages… In the case of an entirely new product, a market must be created."1

Supply-side markets are associated with what we refer to as innovation-driven high technology. The company's top strategic and marketing objective is to achieve profitable commercial applications for laboratory output. In this seminal phase of market development, R&D is the prime mover behind marketing's efforts. As an advertising agency executive specializing in high-technology products notes, high-tech efforts of this genre rely on a "presumptive need" rather than identification of buyers' desires.

Later, as high-tech markets mature, more normal demand-side conditions begin to prevail. In this market-driven kind of situation, R&D's task is to respond to the specific market needs identified by marketing, R&D, top management, and others. Here marketing's role is more traditional (i.e., more focused on advertising, pricing, distribution, and so on), much less entrepreneurial, and far more concerned with tight linkage between marketing and R&D. In brief, laboratory efforts are patterned after market objectives.

Today's high-tech companies must face the ongoing challenge of adapting organizationally and philosophically as their markets evolve from supply side to demand side. That evolution is usually not a smooth process. Early on, any market-share leader is in a precarious position. A continual threat exists that a giant (e.g., AT&T or Exxon) will enter into its industry or market niche. Also, a competitor's technological discovery or improvement, even one made by a start-up company, can make obsolete the leader's technology and the products or processes on which it is based. Some suggest, for example, that a tiny Findlay, Ohio-based holography start-up has outpaced two longstanding Fortune "500" entrants. In fact, one day's leader, perhaps an Osborne Computer, can become the next day's Chapter 11 or state-of-the-art victim.

Executives successful in an innovation-driven situation may have difficulty adjusting to a market-driven environment. These managers fail to reorient themselves so that they can compete effectively under the new conditions.

Several years ago we encountered a start-up consumer-products company that had received substantial backing from venture capitalists. This funding was based largely on the president's previous development of an eminently successful high-tech industrial product. However, he had sold the company producing the product while it was still in the innovation-driven stage of market development, and thus he had never directed a company in a competitive environment.

The president and others who ran the new consumer-products company had engineering backgrounds. They had little marketing experience; indeed, they were contemptuous of marketing activities and refused to commit any funds to explore consumer sentiment, potential market demand, and possible advertising themes. Not surprisingly, the company has yet to earn a dollar of earnings and is on the verge of bankruptcy. The technical skills and acumen that served the president so well before have been much less relevant to the different demands in a market-driven milieu.

We believe that management should not view marketing and R&D as an either-or strategic proposition. Just as there are technically trained top executives who are also good marketers, there are marketing professionals with no technological training who successfully help guide high-tech companies. A few high-technology companies, such as Apple Computer, have even looked to consumer-goods marketing professionals to provide marketing leadership.

Distinguishing Between High-Tech Companies

"High tech" has become a buzzword to describe everything from the space shuttle to the electric frying pan. In our judgment, businesses must meet three criteria to be labeled "high technology":

1. The business requires a strong scientific-technical basis.

2. New technology can quickly make existing technology obsolete.

3. As new technologies come on stream, their applications create or revolutionize markets and demand.

For the purpose of discussing marketing-R&D linkage, the most important distinction is between what we have called market-driven and innovation-driven high technology. Market-driven high-technology companies assign R&D the task of producing innovations that meet specific market objectives. By contrast, for innovation-driven high-technology companies, what customers need or want is residual. After the R&D breakthrough is made, customer needs or wants are considered. G.D. Searle's low-calorie sweetener, Aspartame, was discovered accidentally by a lab researcher who was involved with a quite different research project. Only then was the commercial application made. We can differentiate further between market-driven and innovation-driven companies.

Market-driven companies

These companies fall into one of two groups:

1. The state-of-the-art-plus group.

R&D advances move deliberately as competitors turn modifications and improvements in existing technology into incremental advantage. In the area of robotics, for instance, new steps often occur from customer suggestions. As DeVilbiss Company robotics division marketing executive Timothy Bublick explains, "You develop a robot spray-gun attachment to paint for a specific customer and then it [the modification] becomes a product adaptation to the current state of the art."

If followed exclusively, such a deliberate approach could result in delays in technological breakthroughs. In the semiconductor field, the industry's ability to find ways to cram more transistors into a single chip may forestall advances in optics.

2. The problem-solving group.

These companies do not restrict themselves to current state-of-the-art techniques. As the first high-tech marketer, Thomas Edison, observed, "First, be sure a thing is wanted or needed, then go ahead."

Seconding his view, Edward W. Ungar, head of Battelle Memorial Institute (one of the world's foremost contract R&D organizations) remarked, "In corporate R&D, most ideas for new products need to be evaluated against the test of whether or not the product will be accepted in the competitive marketplace." In applying this problem-solving orientation, Schering-Plough is coupling its discovery abilities with its marketing strengths. Schering-Plough delicately balances a heavy R&D effort with a practical view of how it will position each scientific breakthrough to meet the company's specific long-run objectives.

Innovation-driven companies

Many high-tech companies, laboratories, or divisions or subsidiaries of major corporations are essentially research businesses. For example, companies of all types and sizes are currently giving attention to biotechnology.

Among those pitted in basic gene-splicing research are companies like Biogen and Genentech, along with a number of the more market-driven pharmaceutical and chemical companies. The possible applications of biotechnology are so numerous that the initial battle has been waged for basic patents.2 While forecasters talk of developments ranging from disease-free grains to microorganisms for gobbling up oil spills, the range may be so vast that some companies may delay or ignore entirely important commercial applications.

In addition, U.S. military and space research has made possible sundry products for consumer and industrial markets. The resulting nonmilitary by-products often have little resemblance to the original applications. Already on the market, for example, in Pizza Time Theatres, are video games that use laser technology; the fruits of Singer Aerospace research are in its sewing machines and handheld power tools. In effect, market-driven research for the military and space programs is innovation-driven when it comes to consumer and industrial markets.

Market planning that explicitly recognizes and accounts for the strategic distinction between market-driven and innovation-driven research goes a long way toward yielding better corporate performance. Establishing realistic expectations early on mitigates cross fire later between R&D and marketing about "who is at fault" when a project fails to yield products that are readily marketable. Moreover, it gives solid direction to the marketing research people who seek the strongest commercial applications for a technological advance.

Linkage Roles for Marketing and R&D

Managers of high-technology companies like to think of themselves as being market-driven. Three-fourths of the executives we surveyed indicate that their new product ideas typically result from specific responses to market opportunities, rather than from R&D initiatives. (For details on our research, see the insert.)

In its 1982 annual report, German-based Nixdorf Computer stated candidly, "[Nixdorf] maintains two technology centers [Silicon Valley and Tokyo] which monitor…trends in fundamental research and user-oriented technology and assess their potential benefits for Nixdorf's own R&D efforts." Thus the company uses the marketplace and competitor developments to provide its window on technology.

Another example of market specificity is Genetic Systems Corp.'s approach in writing lucid market goals guiding its R&D efforts over the short-, intermediate-, and long-term. Its short-term goals identify the need for products to diagnose infectious diseases and cancer. Intermediate goals focus on automated products to identify blood types, and its long-term goals pertain to products for treating infectious diseases and cancer.

As shown in the Exhibit, in market-driven high technology, the main direction for R&D is from marketing. R&D's reaction (dotted arrow) comes in the form of guidance on what is technically feasible and ideas from scientific circles. Formal marketing research, typical to consumer and industrial markets, is helping high-tech managers guide R&D. For example, our data show that executives extensively use traditional research techniques, such as concept testing, product prototypes, and market tests. Over 90% of the executives in our study find that concept testing is helpful in forecasting the success of potential new products.

Exhibit Conceptualizing the high-technology marketing-R&D interface

Innovation-driven high technology offers a marked contrast, as R&D provides the stimulus and marketing officials must find applications or simply sell the product. These efforts can help create new markets by applying lab breakthroughs to largely unperceived buyer needs. A latent demand for in-home pregnancy tests may have existed for centuries, but biotechnology made these tests feasible and inexpensive. Researchers have also been successful in deriving other low-cost diagnostic tests for hepatitis, prostate cancer, and venereal disease. Yet only a few years ago the commercial potential of the underlying technology appeared poor. Certainly, few businesses would have bet that such diagnostic tests would lead to a major new medical market so soon.

Our research indicates that innovation-driven high-technology companies rely on qualitative marketing research techniques. Their managers place little stock in the mathematically based methods of marketing research that more mature companies use—methods requiring an abundance of data from a representative sampling for drawing statistical inferences.

Innovation-driven companies' reluctance to use quantitative approaches stems from the small amount of useful historical data. And primary data from traditional interviews of prospective buyers or users are of dubious value in answering questions about possible products or applications resulting from new technologies. In fact, some 85% of the executives in our research report using focus groups to qualify new products.

What Marketing with What R&D?

As the organizational complexity of a company increases, the possibilities for linking marketing and R&D in profitably innovative ways become more intriguing. Our studies have led us to identify four general types of high-technology companies, according to their degree of organizational complexity:

1. The high-technology company that is not part of a larger corporation and is engaged basically in one industry (for example, Prab Robots). It may be a fledgling venture or a market leader.

2. A traditional consumer or industrial enterprise with one high-tech division or subsidiary. The corporation's primary business is not high technology, but it has diversified into high-tech via startups (Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Goodyear Aerospace) or acquisitions (Champion Spark Plug and DeVilbiss).

3. A high-technology division or subsidiary that is but one of several or many such units in a company. The corporation is almost exclusively (Hazeltine) or partly (United Technologies) involved in high technology.

4. Companies competing in the same industry forming a cooperative R&D venture. This arrangement prevents duplication of each other's research efforts. For instance, semiconductor and computer concerns have formed the Microelectronics Computer Research Corporation in Austin, Texas, to derive technologies for use by the member companies and for licensing the technologies to nonmembers.

In the first and second types of companies, the linkage problem is straightforward, but, in the third and fourth types, marketing and R&D appear at many places and levels in the organization. They may even be directed from corporate headquarters.

We suggest that management ask the question "what marketing with what R&D?" again and again. A high-tech division in a diversified corporation may be able to give a sister division in a different industry or in a different market the technology it needs to develop new market niches or entire markets. Marketing-R&D linkage between and among divisions as well as within divisions can stimulate ideas for new products and commercial applications. The rewards of cross-pollination of ideas among divisions come from triggering previously undiscovered market applications or correcting competitive shortcomings in product quality.

Goodyear Aerospace, the high-technology subsidiary of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, has at least twice shared technological know-how from Aerospace's Defense Systems Division with its sister division, the Aircraft Wheel and Brake Division, to solve several of the latter's competitive problems. Defense Systems offers defense-oriented electronics to the U.S. military. In contrast, Aircraft sells aircraft wheels, brakes, and brake-control systems to both commercial and military aircraft manufacturers. In the early 1970s, Defense Systems transferred integrated circuit technology to Aircraft. Later, at the end of the 1970s, Defense Systems transferred digital design technology. In both instances, the technology shared had positive effects on Aircraft's market competitiveness.

An official of Corning Glass Works provided us with a better illustration of a diverse cross-divisional application. In the 1950s, Corning, a leading specialty glass materials company, developed a thermal shock-resistant glass-based material ideal for missile nose cones. It was able to withstand the heat and stress of going from ground zero to space and atmospheric re-entry, even at supersonic speeds. While this in itself was a major breakthrough, the late R. Lee Waterman, former CEO of Corning, saw a different and unique application for this material (trademarked PYROCERAM). In 1958, he introduced versatile Corning Ware cookware that could go directly from the freezer to the oven or stovetop. However, the story does not end there. Some 20 years later, another property of this original nose cone material—its transparency to radio signals—permitted an extension of its consumer application as an ideal cookware for microwave ovens.

Establishing the Interface

Marketers in high-tech businesses need to know what R&D is developing today and on the horizon, so they can realistically analyze and understand their planning constraints. The linkage in market-driven high technology comes primarily through R&D's active participation in the market planning process, especially in the objective-setting stage. In market planning, R&D can guarantee that marketing does not lose sight of R&D's vision for the product. The corollary is that marketers can offer parameters for the researchers' efforts. Through the give-and-take of setting objectives, R&D and marketing can agree on the target market, priorities, expectations, and timing.

The linkage in market-driven situations needs to be formal and carefully designed; a high-tech marketing team is a must. Face-to-face, in-person interaction and an agenda for meetings are most productive. Marketing and R&D people should talk almost daily during the initial market planning effort for a new product or application and regularly thereafter for updating and revision. To avoid later misunderstandings, both R&D and marketing should agree on and write the goals and objectives of the marketing plan. Our research finds that R&D's actual involvement in formulating marketing strategies and tactics is best off limited to a technical-consultative role. The approach of Micom Systems, Inc. illustrates.

Micom, a microcomputer company formed in 1980, has grown from $5 million to $83 million in annual sales. For the first three years, Micom followed the all-too-usual corporate path of not linking marketing and R&D, and according to Steve Frankel, vice president of marketing and development, R&D and marketing were competing. To build the team orientation needed, the two activities merged, as Frankel explains.

"My organization, Marketing and Development, has the corporate responsibility for all marketing (product planning, marketing management, promotional input, and manuals) and development (all engineering and R&D) activities performed by the corporation. Within Marketing and Development, we have three assistant vice presidents who manage, on a product-line basis, the marketing and development activities of their respective product areas. Within each product-line organization, we have [an] individual marketing and development team… At Micom, marketing and development groups work together to define new directions and solutions to the needs of their specific product areas. Once agreement is made, however,…the marketing activity proceeds with the classical marketing functions while the engineering team begins the engineering process.

"As the project proceeds, project status information is available to both groups, and in-house quality and functional testing, beta-test site testing, and product-user manual reviews are also joint activities. So, in summary, the marketing and development teams work together on the front and tail end of projects, and work independently from project go-ahead to the product testing and evaluation phase. Of course, if the development project does not proceed according to plan (i.e., cost or schedule) or market conditions change, we jointly reevaluate our position."

The interface needs of innovation-driven high-technology companies are different. The possibilities for applications may be less obvious or so numerous that the company must establish priorities for exploitation. Biotechnology again provides an example.

Marketable opportunities for gene-splicing seem vast, including cancer therapy, disease-free orchids, and who knows what else. Therefore, much of the early interface efforts should address such questions as what industry is the company in, what are the conceivable market opportunities, and what are the market development priorities? Once these are answered, the types of linkage guidelines appropriate for market-driven high technology apply to innovation-driven high technology as well.

Finally, consider the linkage needs of the multidivision major corporation with market-driven and innovation-driven interface demands and, perhaps, a portfolio of high-tech and low-tech strategic business units (SBUs). In this kind of organization, the marketing-R&D interface becomes a two-stage process. Within each SBU, either a market-driven or an innovation-driven interface is appropriate, but the creative linkage process should not end there. A vehicle for cross-pollination of ideas and technologies among the various SBUs is vital, but may be difficult to implement. Although company-specific recommendations are needed, possibilities might include both the establishment of a conventional corporatewide marketing-R&D committee or project team and a more experimental approach such as in-house trade shows for the company's SBUs to demonstrate and publicize otherwise proprietary knowledge and offerings to one another. The following example of Allied Corporation illustrates a cross-pollination effort:

Top management at Allied Corporation is seeking to eliminate the historical barriers between R&D and marketing. For example, new product venture groups have formed and major laboratory facilities are consolidated at corporate headquarters. As a cornerstone, Allied has created an in-house office of science and technology, which brokers technology; it will "match 'clients' in operating companies with technology in the labs."3

Again, as with Goodyear Aerospace and Corning Glass, we see a multidivisional company that has not stopped with the question of how to link marketing and R&D within business units. Allied's technology broker will promote new marketing-R&D linkage opportunities by asking, in effect, "How about the commercial market opportunities of matching Division X's technological know-how with the needs of Division Y's marketing?"

Who Belongs on the High-Tech Team?

The makeup of the marketing-R&D team often depends on whether the product or application is in development or being sold. In development, the company focuses on product and market planning, from conception through actual introduction. Our data note that marketing's consulting is prevalent in the research and development phase, but, contrary to some views, not to the detriment of R&D.

In successful companies, both of these functions work in tandem with each other throughout production. Additionally, the top executive in the perceptive high-tech company stays involved in every major development decision. Apple Computer's president, John Sculley, is right on target; he has mandated that Apple's top management pay close attention to product development so that more disciplined market strategy will result.

The high-tech development strategy group consists of the CEO or president, marketing, R&D, and production in roughly three-fourths of the companies we sampled. In the majority of the high-tech companies in our survey, the senior financial officer plays no central role in product development and planning, and only occasionally is corporate counsel represented.

So, with few exceptions, marketing and R&D are members of the key development decision-making team. We were not surprised, then, to see a company like McDonnell Douglas Automation Company (McAuto), whose main business is CAD/CAM time sharing, merge the formerly separate areas of marketing and R&D, enabling the company to establish a development-to-marketing line for technical products.4

Just as marketing is heavily involved in R&D during precommercialization, R&D participates in marketing activities during the selling stage. The high-tech marketers surveyed register strong dissent to the notion that the R&D people's involvement with a new product ends when it is turned over to marketing; 85% encourage a continuing role for R&D.

Clearly, R&D's efforts do not end once the selling begins. What form might R&D involvement on the marketing side take? Our findings show that R&D is active in a number of disparate marketing functions, including preparation of brochures and technical manuals, marketing research, and, to a lesser extent, consultation in public relations, advertising and sales promotion, and pricing. R&D's participation in trade shows is direct; over one-third of the companies we surveyed have R&D representation at trade shows. We witnessed this at the 13th ROBOTS 7 Exposition in Chicago in April 1983, where R&D people from many of the exhibitors held discussions with prospective buyers. As a corollary, our research reveals that in the robotics industry, about one-fifth of the companies involve the R&D department in selling the product.

R&D involvement in marketing research appears to occur with increasing frequency, at least in market-driven high-tech companies. For example, Masahiko Kajitani, the general manager of video planning at Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, has said that companies should avoid overdelegating marketing and consumer studies to people uninvolved in product development. General Electric sends out design engineers to obtain customer opinions on GE's electronic wares.5 Further, many companies consider the introductory sales stage a quasi-test market and use the resulting feedback from customers to modify the product. In such instances, obviously, R&D remains involved.

Besides R&D officials, who else is on the interface team during the selling stage? The composition may vary by high-tech industry. Our inquiries reveal that applications support personnel are directly represented in the selling efforts of more than three-fourths of the robotics companies. Thus, their presence is also appropriate for the interface group. Middlemen, such as industrial distributors or agents, may also be involved in the robotics companies' linkage efforts.

Similarly, in the medical field, customer-service people are sometimes part of the marketing team and the linkage activity. Backing up the high-tech marketing team are the traditional specialized support organizations, mainly advertising agencies and marketing research firms, as well as other consultants. The advertising agency is more integrally involved in the company's total marketing efforts than in typical consumer marketing, where in-house marketers chart the course. In the opinion of Richard Reiser, the California-based advertising executive, "True marketing—marketing strategy and positioning, not sales alone—often only occurs when the advertising agency sits down to plan a campaign."

When Marketing and R&D Go Their Own Ways

We hear repeatedly that the lack of integration of marketing and R&D is a major obstacle to market success in high technology, and where an interface does exist, it is an inherently adversarial situation in which lab jockeys and pitchmen do not mix.

When we asked executives in a broad spectrum of high-technology companies for their opinions, more than three-fourths think that most companies make some effort to link marketing and R&D. Moreover, they see product planning as both an R&D and a marketing function. Also we find that high-technology marketing people have a predominately scientific background. Ostensibly, then, marketing and R&D managers have little reason to fail to communicate effectively with one another. Even so, we find that power plays or strained relations do frequently occur and that marketing-R&D linkage suffers in the process. A widely publicized example is the friction at the newly deregulated American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Intense infighting for control between AT&T's marketing people and its technically oriented Western Electric group has become so bitter that the company has already lost key members of its cadre of marketing executives. Turning a longtime technology-driven regulated monopoly into a market-driven competitor is a formidable chore.

Fortunately, lack of sufficient interface in most companies usually results from more benign organizational factors like geographical separation and the difficulty of melding high-tech subsidiaries with a company's traditional product offerings. But geography and product line differences are not insurmountable obstacles if a company works at linkage. TRW Inc., a diverse and geographically dispersed manufacturer headquartered in Cleveland, infused marketing concepts into its West Coast high-technology group while instilling a high-technology orientation in its traditional smokestack operations in the Midwest.

TRW's situation is not unusual. Often a company's headquarters, by design or through acquisition, is located some distance from its high-tech unit or subsidiary. For strategic reasons, the company may have placed the high-tech group in a research environment (Silicon Valley, Route 128, or Research Triangle), or an attractive site (Aspen or Austin, for example), or at some distance from headquarters' distractions. With such real or perceived obstacles, roughly half the executives we surveyed see R&D as having limited meaningful involvement in marketing planning.

What can happen if a company limits R&D participation principally to the research arena? Mark Frantz, president of the rapidly growing Frantz Medical Development Ltd., comments, "Our business is built on the fact that so many companies do not involve their inventors in the final development of the product and the marketing side of the business." Frantz's company obtains promising medical patents and, with the inventor acting as product champion, produces and markets these innovations. This example of a company taking advantage of corporate-research separation highlights the need for ongoing top management attention to the linkage problem.

We believe that marketing and R&D linkage is achievable, regardless of company size and complexity. Undoubtedly, top management's direct input is necessary if either marketing or R&D is subordinate or totally removed from the other's decision making. Top management must carefully orchestrate these first steps to ensure that the linkage has the appropriate priority. Once set, each marketing-R&D group will be concerned not only with market planning but also with offering directions for new research and applications. As we have emphasized, large multiple division companies need to develop systems that ensure consideration of all possible applications of new technology.

1. "Creativity in Modern Industry," Omni, March 1981, p. 6.

2. Tamar Lewin, "The Patent Race in Gene-Splicing," New York Times, August 29, 1982.

3. "Allied After Bendix: R&D is the Key," Business Week, December 12, 1983, p. 79.

4. Philip Maher, "CAD/CAM Vendors Plot a New Course," Business Marketing, April 1983, p. 66.

5. "Listening to the Voice of the Marketplace," Business Week, February 21, 1983, p. 90.

A version of this article appeared in the November 1984 issue of Harvard Business Review.