To Serve of Create? Strategic Orientations Toward Customers and Innovation

摘要

The mode transitions discussed above have much in common with Schot- ter's perspective on economic institutions, namely, that the institution's develop- ment can be inferred from the existence of an evolutionary problem, for every evolutionary economic problem requires a social institution to solve it. The history of marketing specifically, and of organizations generally, is consistent with this perspective. Vertically integrated functional organizations (such as Ford at the time of the Model T) dominated the early years of this century, when rela- tively stable market environments characterized by low customer purchasing power and simple customer preferences caused the focus to be on production.