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  3. Read the article below about being first to market, and the questions on the opposite page. For each question(13-18), mark o

Read the article below about being first to market, and the questions on the opposite page. For each question(13-18), mark o

admin2016-11-29  21
问题     Read the article below about being first to market, and the questions on the opposite page.
    For each question(13-18), mark one letter(A, B, C or D)on your Answer Sheet.
                  Think Twice About Being First to Market
    New research offers fresh insight on when to launch a product or service, and shows that being first to market isn’t always a competitive advantage.
    In 2004, David Cohen had an idea for a social network for mobile phones that would connect users in the real world. His Boulder(Colo.)-based company, called iContact, raised $600,000 from investors and the founders’ contributions, launched a beta version, and seemed poised to tap the much hyped mobile software market. Cohen, then 36, had already founded a successful software company. But after 18 months, he was unable to get phone carriers to distribute his software, and he shuttered the company, returning 80% of his investors’ money. "Everybody was saying mobile was coming, it was going to be open: GPS was coming, it was going to be great," says Cohen. "That didn’t really happen for another four years. " Bets on mobile applications didn’t begin to pay off until Apple’s(AAPL)iPhone app store opened the market in 2008.
    Conventional wisdom says being first to market creates a competitive advantage. Reality is more complicated. Market opportunities are constantly opening and closing, and a hit idea at one point could be a dud a year earlier or a yawning "me too" business a year later. It’s tough—likely impossible— to pinpoint the best moment to enter a market, but common sense dictates new entrepreneurs can improve their odds if they weigh how much they stand to gain or lose by waiting.
    New academic research suggests one way entrepreneurs can evaluate whether they should enter a market first or wait on the sidelines. The decision depends on how hostile the learning environment is: that is, how much entrepreneurs can learn by observing other players before they launch compared to what they learn from participating after they enter, according to Moren Levesque, an entrepreneur-ship researcher at the University of Waterloo.
    The core findings on timing is this: in a hostile learning environment, entrepreneurs gain relatively little benefit by watching others. For example, if the relevant knowledge is protected intellectual property, studying the market before entering wouldn’t yield much advantage. In these situations, the trade-off favours entering early. But in less hostile learning environments, where entrepreneurs gain valuable information likely to increase their success just by watching other companies, companies benefit from waiting and learning lessons from earlier players. IContact’s successors, for example, may have learned from watching the company’s trouble getting mobile networks to distribute their software, a barrier that was removed by the iPhone’s app store.
    However, deciding when to enter a market solely on the advantages of learning is not enough. Entrepreneurs also need to launch before an opportunity closes. In the summer of 2007, Sunny Gupta, a serial entrepreneur in Seattle, began exploring an idea for on-demand software to help large companies track their IT spending and reduce costs, after a contact at Wall Street firm casually mentioned the issue. He spent that summer and early fall talking to chief information officers at Fortune 500 companies about the type of software they needed. Gupta originally planned to spend about a year building the product. But on a trip to New York in October 2007 to meet with ClOs at financial companies, he saw they were under intense pressure to cut costs and justify their IT spending—precisely what his product would do. Gupta realized he needed to speed up his launch to take advantage of the market opportunity before other companies got there. He and his co-founders started working around the clock and by November, Apptio(as they dubbed the firm)raised $7 million in venture capital. By March 2008, Apptio had four paying customers using a beta version of the product. A full launch followed in June, and Gupta had already demonstrated Apptio’s ability to reduce costs by the time the financial crisis erupted in September. Apptio now has nearly three dozen clients and 30 employees. " I believe the window of opportunity was within those six months: from March to September 2008," Gupta says now.
    There is, of course, some element of luck. Cohen believed he was positioning iContact at a similar sweet spot in the market. But entrepreneurs who ignore timing, or assume that being first is always better, do so at their peril. Deciding when to enter a market is an irreversible and important decision.
What does "improve their odds" in the second paragraph mean?
选项 A、Increase the possibility of success
B、Get a deeper insight on the market
C、Have a more favorable business environment
D、Develop more mature products
答案A
解析 “improve their odds”的意思
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