1/18/2000
It may sound far-fetched at first, but Fine, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, has developed new insights into business strategy, especially supply chain management, based on the study of fruit flies. It's not the flies themselves that matter to Fine, but the way researchers use their genetic similarity to humans and their extremely brief life cycle to gain understanding of changes in longer evolving species. In Clockspeed, Fine looks at "the fruit flies of business," companies in fast-evolving industries like computers and information/entertainment, to gain understanding of a wide range of slower-evolving industries like automobiles, airplanes and semiconductors. "The dynamics of fruit fly evolution," he says, "can lead to insights about how individual companies and entire industries evolve and adapt, as well as what dangers they face if they do not adapt quickly enough."