What are the living spaces for small enterprises?

In his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, he formally put forward the concept of living space for small enterprises. Choosing the business field of the enterprise's living space is actually monopolizing a small field in the market, thus avoiding competition and challenges, exerting its unique expertise on the edge of large enterprises, striving to become the leader of some special products and technologies, gradually accumulating business resources and looking for opportunities to show off. In order to obtain the comparative advantage of operating resources, the principle of small and medium-sized enterprises choosing business areas should be to seek the survival position of enterprises. Paul, two other American business experts? Sohlman, Thomas? In the book Enterprise Competitive Strategy, Friedman put forward a concept similar to the living space of small enterprises: ecological space. They believe that the competition between enterprises is just like the competition between different biological species in nature. The weak can survive and multiply because they have their own ecological space, and these ecological spaces do not completely coincide with the living space of the strong. The author believes that there are five main business areas suitable for the survival and development of small enterprises, that is, five living spaces for small enterprises. In order to obtain excess profits and pursue economies of scale, large enterprises with natural living space generally adopt the method of few varieties and large quantities, which naturally leaves many narrow fields for small and medium-sized enterprises that are difficult for large enterprises to set foot in. We call these business areas natural niches. The characteristics of common natural niche products are: ① small market scale, producing products with little value for large enterprises; (2) products that large enterprises think have high reputation risk; ③ Multi-variety and small batch production mode products; Small batch of special products. Many small and medium-sized enterprises choose natural niche to invest in business resources and grow up without competing with large enterprises. For example, a farmer entrepreneur in Laiwu City found that although Tianjin is a well-known cloth nest in China and the textile industry is very developed, its products mainly develop to high, refined and sophisticated, and low-grade cotton cloth with low profit is ignored. But there are also low-income people in Tianjin who need low-grade fabrics. Even other consumers need a certain amount of low-grade cotton cloth for curtain cloth, clothes lining and quilt lining, and many elderly people still keep the habit of wearing cloth clothes. So he organized our factory to produce low-grade cotton cloth in large quantities and sold it to Tianjin market, which was very popular. For another example, Kai Guanchang is a small collective factory. It is understood that six state-owned factories that manufacture electrical control equipment have basically occupied the national market, but they do not produce non-standard electrical control equipment with small quantity and miscellaneous specifications. Users with this demand can't find manufacturers all over the country. In addition, these large enterprises adopt the way of annual ordering, and it is difficult for some users who are in urgent need of equipment to be satisfied. Therefore, the factory regards the production of non-standard electronic control equipment as the service direction of the factory, and has formulated the business policy that the big factory lacks us, the big factory lacks us to make up, and the big factory does not do what we do. As long as the customer needs it, come and come, without any specifications and quantities. The enterprise has achieved success and its products are sold all over the country. Under normal circumstances, when the current generation of products begins to decline and the next generation of products has not yet been put into use, there will often be a strategic gap in the market. In such a market gap, we can often find an niche suitable for the growth of small enterprises, which we can call a blank niche. Small and medium-sized enterprises should actively seek such opportunities, and those who are good at this will certainly succeed. As we know, the transistor was invented by the famous Bell Laboratories in 1947, and many people realized that the electron tube would eventually be replaced by the transistor. However, several large American companies that dominated the electronics industry in the world at that time were still addicted to the superb production technology of luxury superheterodyne radios, and did not immediately switch to transistor radios, but planned to convert electron tubes into transistors around 1970. At that time, Sony Corporation of Japan was unknown internationally, and did not produce household electronic products at all. Akita Sendo, president of Sony, bought the technology transfer right from Bell Laboratories at an absurd price of $25,000. Two years later, Sony introduced the first batch of portable transistor radios, which weighed less than one-fifth and cost less than one-third compared with electron tube radios with the same function on the market. Three years later, Sony occupied the American low-end radio market, and five years later, Japan occupied the world radio market. The economic scale of cooperative living space enterprises is the least common multiple of the economic scale of producing various parts. For large enterprises that produce complex products, it is impossible to make every process meet the requirements of economies of scale. Large enterprises want to maximize profits or save costs, get rid of the shackles of a large and comprehensive production system, and pursue the perfection of cooperation with their external (sub-packaging plants). For example, there are 248 Japanese Toyota companies that have awarded contracts, and these 248 companies will award contracts to more than 4,000 companies for the second time. More than 80% parts of Matsushita Electric are produced by cooperative factories. A large enterprise recruits a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises (the production and supply of parts needed by large enterprises) and establishes a relatively stable cooperative relationship. Enterprise groups with this cooperative relationship are called enterprise series, such as Toyota series, Hitachi series, Panasonic series, Nissan series and NTT series in Japan. This cooperative relationship actually provides survival orientation for small and medium-sized enterprises, and we can call it cooperative small system. Small and medium-sized enterprises should strive to enter the enterprise series belonging to the leadership system of large enterprises, and cooperate with large enterprises for a long time with special assets, so as to survive and develop by relying on mountains. Small enterprises that specialize in living space and have unique technology and production skills can use industrial property rights to prevent large enterprises from getting their hands on their proprietary knowledge and infiltrating into their product markets, thus forming a niche of expertise conducive to the growth of small enterprises under the protection of the legal system. In the process of production and operation, small and medium-sized enterprises can obtain novel, advanced and practical scientific and technological inventions through technological development and innovation, or design new structures, new forms and new decorations of products. These can be used as a means to open up new market segments, meet new social needs, reduce product production costs, expand product differentiation and enhance the competitive advantage of enterprises. And large enterprises have stronger scientific research achievements, commercialization ability and market control ability than small and medium-sized enterprises. Once the expertise of small and medium-sized enterprises is imitated, it will be squeezed out of the market because of the premature decline of knowledge value. Under the protection of industrial property rights, small and medium-sized enterprises can obtain exclusive rights or monopoly rights, avoid the expulsion and struggle of large enterprises, and win a relatively stable growth environment. Not only a few small enterprises with excellent technological development ability can enter the niche of expertise, but many small and medium-sized enterprises can also obtain such niche for themselves through the patent transfer system, because for some enterprises or scientific research institutions, it is often more economical to sell new technological achievements at high prices than to monopolize their own use. At present, there are millions of patent achievements in the world that need to be evaluated. In our real life, there are often some potential living spaces that are only partially satisfied, not satisfied at all or are gestating the upcoming social needs. The potential market segmentation formed by this demand blind spot can be called potential niche. Finding and predicting potential demand is a very difficult and artistic job. Once small and medium-sized enterprises find a potential niche with good prospects, they should start to do a good job in development, production, sales and management, so as to establish a greater first-move advantage (the first-move advantage comes from many factors, such as the role of learning curve, customer trust, patent protection, the first use of rare resources and so on). ), strengthen commercial barriers, improve the barriers for latecomers to enter, improve their monopoly ability, and extend the time for SMEs to monopolize this market, thus obtaining rich benefits.