Objectivo: Criar interdependências!

Mais um interessante artigo sobre Mongo.
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"Interdependency, Competition, and Industry Dynamics" de Michael J. Lenox, Scott F. Rockart e Arie Y. Lewin. Publicado pela revista Management Science (Vol. 53, No. 4, April 2007, pp. 599–615).
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"Critical to understanding contemporary differences in market share and profitability among firms within an industry (Moi ici: Cá voltamos a este tema que me fascina, a distribuição de produtividades como um fenómeno intra-sectorial) is systematic knowledge of how those differences arose in the first place.
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Understanding the structural evolution of industries — the rate of change in output and prices, the rates of entry and exit (turnover), and the growth and decline of individual firms (mobility) and industry participation — is widely recognized as fundamental to identifying the origins of profitable market leaders who can sustain performance over time. Industry evolution provides important contingencies that affect the viability of various firm strategies."
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"Over the years, researchers have endeavored to develop clear characterizations of industry evolution. Central to these investigations has been the observance of shakeout, i.e., a rise and then fall in the number of competitors over time. Following the inception of an industry, new entrants rush in, often driving up the rate of innovation and leading to a diverse set of ways to deliver value. Competition intensifies and industry exit increases. Over time the rate of
entry decreases, eventually stabilizing at a low level.
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As a result, the number of firms within the industry grows exponentially at first, then peaks, and then declines, typically settling in with a few dominant firms."
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Aqui vai a proposta de trabalho dos autores:
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"we propose that interdependency in productive activities provides a robust, alternative explanation for the stylized facts about industry evolution and shakeout. By “interdependency in productive activities,” we refer to the potential for the value of one activity to depend on whether a firm engages in another activity. In the presence of interdependent and potentially complementary activities, firms face barriers to search and often struggle to discover valuable configurations of productive activities." (Moi ici: Este factor das interdependências é, na minha opinião, fundamental para que Mongo seja uma realidade)
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"In this paper, we construct and analyze a model of industry evolution in the presence of interdependency among firm activities."
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"Differences in interdependency not only provide an explanation for why incumbents are more or less successful in different industries, but they also can explain why incumbents contribute more to technological progress in some industries while in other industries recent entrants make larger contributions.(Moi ici: Claro, as interdependências são espaço de Minkowski puro e duro. As escolhas que fazemos hoje estão limitadas pelas escolhas que fizemos ontem e vão limitar as escolhas que poderemos fazer no futuro. Hummmmm, já sinto o cheiro da batotice no ar.)
In this way, our model provides a potential resolution to the debate between the “old” and “new” Schumpeter about the growth contributions of incumbent firms versus new entrants. In industries where the potential for interdependency is low, incumbent firms are more likely to innovate and drive growth. (Moi ici: Claro, my twisted mind, já está na batota... apesar do que os autores escrevem, como veremos mais à frente, a questão que se me coloca desde já é, como é que as PMEs podem aumentar o grau de interdependência? O batoteiro que há em mim, o artista que dentro de mim se quer desenvolver, começa logo a metralhar: que ofertas? que capacidades? que actividades? que investimentos? que cultura pode aumentar o grau de interdependências?)
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We argue that interdependency is at least as compelling as scale-based explanations as a way of explaining industry dynamics. Interdependency complements these scale-based explanations by providing a separate mechanism to explain industry dynamics in general—and shakeout in particular—in markets where adjustment costs are low or linear or where innovation returns are independent of the previous scale. Interdependency, however, also conflicts with scale-based explanations, as they give rise to empirical predictions that in several cases are directly opposed to those of past models. Ultimately the two explanations differ in a fairly simple but fundamental way. In the presence of interdependency, past innovation conditions future innovation as it does in previous models, but not because they affect incentives to innovate ... because they affect the content of what will be learned from innovative effort.
The key to this explanation is not differences in the amount of past innovative success, but differences in the content of past innovative successes, which lead to different technological trajectories. Our model focuses on the importance of what firms learn rather than solely on how much firms learn and how the nature of learning varies among industries."
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"Activities are interdependent to the extent that “the value of a particular feature of the organization [activity] depends on a variety of other features of the organization [activities].” Interdependent activities are complementary when the marginal value of engaging in one activity is increased by engaging in another.
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The potential for interdependency among a firm’s activities may lead firms to adopt a host of specific practices in concert and may result in “distinctly separated clusters of firm characteristics”. Early random differences in
production decisions condition later choices, potentially leading to quite different bundles of activities (and profitability) for even initially similar firms. These differences in activity bundles may persist as lagging firms struggle to imitate leading firms’ bundles of highly interdependent activities. To the extent that organizations are better at evaluating incremental than radical changes and limited in their ability to fully comprehend or
re-create the practices of rivals without such understanding, the presence of interdependencies will only reinforce within-industry heterogeneity.
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The resulting limits to imitation and search are central to a number of streams of literature in strategy and economics. Fundamental to the resource-based view of strategy is the notion that heterogeneity in individual firm resources and capabilities may lead to performance differences among firms and that these advantages are not “competed away” because of the inability of competitors to perfectly imitate one another."
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Como economistas-cientistas, os autores precisam de um modelo e fazem simplificações. Assim, consideram só o caso da competição pelo preço. E, talvez por isso, assumem que o potencial de interdependência num sector industrial é sempre constante... talvez porque para os autores o atributo é o preço. E se trabalharmos com mais atributos, com mais qualidades, e se os clientes também valorizarem diferentes atributos ao longo do tempo?
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De qualquer forma Mongo rules nas indústrias ou sectores com interdependências mais elevadas... algo na linha da afirmação de que a criação de valor a partir de activos intangíveis é mais recheada em relações de 2ª e 3ª ordem.