The Growth Warriors: Creating Sustainable Global Advantage for America’s Technology Industries

Citation

Jones, M. (2000), "The Growth Warriors: Creating Sustainable Global Advantage for America’s Technology Industries", International Marketing Review, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 85-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/imr.2000.17.1.85.1

Ronald Mascitelli’s Growth Warriors addresses how to create sustainable global advantage for the USA’s technology industries. Mascitelli has spent a career in the field of technology management and competitive strategy and in his latest book he analyses technology advantage from a US perspective and, more interestingly, investigates how US supremacy can be maintained and sustained through to the next millennium. In so doing, however, he draws richly on examples and evidence for Continental Europe and South East Asia; so this book will hold interest to a wider, international audience.

The military theme of the title continues through the book where technology competition is seen as a battlefield on which adversaries battle for the technology high ground. This style of writing is not uncommon in books aimed at the executive market but he does not over‐state the parallels and has ensured that his views are sufficiently underpinned by relevant research; the book is sufficiently academic and rigorous to be useful to those who teach in this dynamic area. The theme of the book is developed around three sections: the global environment for technology enterprise; creating advantage in technology markets; and, strategies for sustained market leadership.

In Part 1 Mascitelli contextualizes the debate and lays the ground rules. He has demonstrated much background research and the chapters are peppered with copious footnotes amplifying the arguments and extending text. In his usage of a number of concepts it is clear that some of this material appears unfamiliar to the author but he is to be commended for covering the ground so comprehensively and not providing superficial treatment to any of these issues. Too many executive books merely pay lip‐service to the academic concepts which underpin much of our knowledge, but Mascitelli has not fallen into this trap. His discussion on the contribution of R&D to growth is particularly sound and many of our political masters would do well to read it.

Part 2 takes the reader to the heart of the issue and covers areas such as knowledge based products; industry and market structure; and innovation. He introduces the concept of tacit and explicit knowledge; the former holds the key to innovation and is gained through experience, practice and learning. He makes the convincing argument that these elements lie at the heart of sustainable competitive advantage and links it back to his earlier discussions on commodity value which yield a three‐dimensional conceptual model defining a given product in terms of its commodity, tacit and explicit contents.

His identification of the importance of learning to innovation in technology is certainly in step with the times and the author could have devoted greater discussion to this theme, perhaps elaborating on the contribution that education and training have to play to the innovative process. Such an approach would have built on the preceding discussion on tacit and explicit knowledge; for the former concerns education in that it equips the individual and organization to win through in conditions of future uncertainty whereas training is very much about the present and reflects the latter, explicit knowledge. Towards the end of Part 2 Mascitelli argues the case for governmental involvement in technology policy correctly identifying the role of Japan’s MITI in shaping strategic direction.

In Part 3 the author maps the strategies required to sustain market leadership. This is where he embellishes upon the tools and techniques necessary for global technological domination. He rightly points to the paucity of sound, rigorous research in the area of strategic technology management and the pervasive nature of the fads peddled by the management “quacks” that try and engage with titles like “If Plato was the CEO of IBM”.

Mascitelli bases the remainder of the book on considerations of time, risk and scenario building and these subsequent chapters go into bewildering detail – but it is worth persevering. All in all this is a sound book that makes a reasonable attempt to identify and promote a coherent approach to a sustainable technology strategy. In the post‐cold war era, Mascitelli’s book with its focus on the achievement of global advantage by US industry may seem a little passé but the content of the book will be a survival kit in the battlefields of the next century.