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Management for Professionals

Christoph Franz
Thomas Bieger
Andreas Herrmann Editors

Evolving
Business
Models
How CEOs Transform
Traditional Companies
Management for Professionals
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10101
Christoph Franz • Thomas Bieger •
Andreas Herrmann
Editors

Evolving Business Models

How CEOs Transform Traditional
Companies
Editors
Christoph Franz Thomas Bieger
Roche Holding Ltd University of St.Gallen
Basel, Switzerland St.Gallen, Switzerland

Andreas Herrmann
Institute of Customer Insight
University of St.Gallen
St.Gallen, Switzerland

ISSN 2192-8096 ISSN 2192-810X (electronic)

Management for Professionals
ISBN 978-3-319-48937-7 ISBN 978-3-319-48938-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48938-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937747

# Springer International Publishing AG 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents

Introduction: Globalization and the Opening of New Markets . . . . . . . . 1

Thomas Bieger, Christoph Franz, and Andreas Herrmann
Transformation of Teaching and Research in a Globalized IT-Driven
World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Thomas Bieger
Banks Caught Between Regulation, Technical Progress,
and Profitability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Martin Blessing and Tobias Bange
Business Models in the Chemical Industry Amid a Changing
Competitive Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Kurt Bock
Business Model Innovation: Some Key Success Factors at Bosch . . . . . . 61
Volkmar Denner
Environmental Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Jens-Uwe Fischer
Innovation for Health: Success Factors for the Research-Based
Pharmaceutical Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Christoph Franz
Industry Expertise and Dynamic Challenges: Perspectives
of an Adopted Railwayman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Rüdiger Grube
The Airline Industry: Flying on Its Own Is not Enough . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Harry Hohmeister
From Data to Business: A Paradigm Shift in Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Joe Kaeser
Engineering the Intangible: Strategic Success Factors in the Luxury
Watch Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Georges A. Kern

v
vi Contents

Industry Expertise in the Digital Media Industry: Specialization vs.

Disruption of Online Business Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Clemens Trautmann
Royal Dutch Shell in a Changing World: Navigating Uncertainty . . . . . 195
Ben van Beurden
Into the Future on the Digital Highway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Dieter Zetsche
About the Authors

Tobias Bange Vice-President, Commerzbank AG, born

in 1960, studied German and sociology in Frankfurt. From
1989 to 1999, he worked as an independent filmmaker for
Hessischer Rundfunk and other public broadcasters. In
1999, he moved to Dresdner Bank and subsequently to
Commerzbank. From 2009 to 2013, he also played an active
role in the staff unit of the Government Commission Ger-
man Corporate Governance Code. Since 2008, he has
worked in the Public Affairs/Issue Management Department
of Commerzbank where his areas of responsibility include
issues relating to financial market regulation.

Thomas Bieger Prof. Dr. rer. pol., Full Professor of

Management with a special focus on the Tourist Industry,
President of the University of St.Gallen and Director of the
Institute for Systemic Management and Public Governance
at the University of St.Gallen (IMP-HSG). Thomas Bieger
has published, conducted research, worked in consultancy
and taught at various universities (among them the Univer-
sity of Innsbruck, the Vienna University of Economics and
Business, the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano
and the University of Otago), with a special focus on service
management and network management, as well as desti-
nation management and location management. He served
as Chairman of CEMS (The global alliance in Management
education) from 2010–2014. Currently he is President of the
Chamber of the Swiss university presidents in within
swissuniversities.

vii
viii About the Authors

Martin Blessing President Personal and Corporate

Banking and President UBS Switzerland, UBS Group AG
and former Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors,
Commerzbank AG, was born in 1963; he studied business
administration in Frankfurt and St.Gallen. From 1989 to
1996, he worked for the management consultants McKinsey
for the last two years as a partner. From 2000 to 2001,
Blessing was Chairman of the Board of the direct bank
Advance Bank which at that time was part of Dresdner
Bank. On 1 November 2001, he became a member of and,
in 2008, Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors. On
7 May 2009, he was appointed Chairman of the Bank’s
Board of Managing Directors by the Supervisory Board of
Commerzbank.

Kurt Bock is Chairman of the Board of Executive

Directors of BASF SE, a position he assumed in May 2011.
Bock is currently responsible for Legal, Taxes and Insurance,
Strategic Planning and Controlling, Communications and
Government Relations, Global Executive Human Resources,
Investor Relations and Compliance. From 2003 until 2011, he
was Chief Financial Officer of BASF SE, and during that
time, from 2007, he was also Chairman and Chief Executive
Officer of BASF Corporation, based in the USA.
In 1985, Bock started his career with BASF in finance.
From 1992 until 1998, he held several management positions in
Germany and Brazil for the automotive supplier and electronics
company Robert Bosch. Bock returned to BASF in 1998.
Kurt Bock was born in Rahden, Eastern Westphalia,
Germany, in 1958. From 1977, he studied Business Admin-
istration at the Universities of Münster and Cologne as well as at Pennsylvania State University,
USA, and received his diploma in 1982 from the University of Cologne. In 1985, he earned his
doctorate in Economics from the University of Bonn. Kurt Bock is married and has three children.

Volkmar Denner has been chairman of the board of

management of Robert Bosch GmbH and a shareholder of
Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG since 1 July 2012. His
responsibilities include corporate strategy, corporate com-
munications and real estate and facilities. As chief tech-
nology officer, he also has corporate responsibility for
research and advance engineering, technology coordination
and new business areas. ln addition, he is responsible for the
subsidiaries Bosch Software Innovations GmbH and Bosch
Healthcare Solutions GmbH.
Born in Uhingen, Germany, on 30 November 1956,
Volkmar Denner is married and has three children. After
taking his university entrance examination in 1975, he stud-
ied physics at the University of Stuttgart, graduating in 1981.
After a research stay in the USA, he completed a doctorate in
physics (Dr. rer. nat.) at the University of Stuttgart in 1985.
About the Authors ix

He is a member of the managing board of the VDA (German Association of the Automotive
lndustry), a member of the executive board of BBUG (Baden-Baden Entrepreneur Talks) and the
chair of the Association of Friends of the University of Stuttgart.

Jens-Uwe Fischer studied metallurgy at the Technical

University Berlin (TU) and Economic Science at the Tech-
nical School Berlin (TFH). After working for 5 years as a
scientific assistant at the Institute of metallurgy TU Berlin,
he functioned in 1984 as the project manager of the German
Agency Technical Cooperation (GTZ) at the Technical
University Istanbul (ITÜ). In 1988, he received a Doctorate
in Metallurgy at in the Technical University Berlin. Since
1989, he worked as the general manager of the Group Berlin
Steelworks GmbH. In 1992, he was employed as the head of
the Department Business Development ABB Fläkt Group
GmbH and appointed as the deputy environmental officer
ABB Germany and later as head of the PC paint application
of the ABB Flexible Automation GmbH. In 1995, he was
employed in the German Railway Association (Deutsche
Bahn AG) as the manager of Soil Remediation Department
and since 1997 as the head of the brownfield recycling management department till 2013. In the
year 2000, he was appointed as an honorary professor at the University Leipzig in the Economic
Science Faculty—Institute for Infrastructure and Resources Management—with the subject inte-
grative brownfield recycling management. Since 2013, he held several advisory positions as senior
expert for example as the chairman of the advisory board and as member of the executive board of
the ITVA (Engineering-Technical Society for contaminated Sites and brownfield recycling) and
since 2016 chairman of the advisory board immobilien-experten AG.
He is a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and as well a
member of the soil protection Commission of the Federal Environment Agency (UBA).

Christoph Franz was born in Frankfurt am Main,

Germany, in 1960. After graduating from Darmstadt Tech-
nical University and the École Centrale de Lyon in Indus-
trial Engineering, he earned his PhD in Political Science
from Darmstadt Technical University and worked as a post-
doc at the University of California, Berkeley.
Franz started his career at Lufthansa AG in 1990 and
joined Deutsche Bahn AG in 1994, where he was appointed
a Member of the Executive Board and CEO of the Passenger
Transport Division. He was then appointed CEO of Swiss
International Air Lines AG in 2004 and was later promoted
to CEO of Lufthansa Airlines in 2009. From 2011 to 2014,
Christoph Franz was the CEO of Deutsche Lufthansa
AG. He has served as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Roche Holding AG since
4 March 2014. Further mandates include the boards of Stadler Rail AG and Zurich Insurance
Company Ltd. He is a Member of the Board of Trustees of Ernst G€ ohner Foundation and of the
Advisory Board of the University of St.Gallen (HSG). Christoph Franz is married and a father of
five children.
x About the Authors

R€
udiger Grube Before joining Deutsche Bahn,
Dr. Rüdiger Grube had been a member of the Board of
Management of Daimler AG since 1 October 2001, where
he was responsible for Corporate Development including
Corporate Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions, Industrial
Participations and IT; from 1 October 2004, he also oversaw
all of Daimler AG’s activities in North East Asia (including
the growing Chinese market). In addition, he served as
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the European Aero-
nautic Defence and Space Company (EADS N.V.).
Born in Hamburg on 2 August 1951, Dr. Rüdiger Grube
completed his commercial and technical training in metal
aircraft construction and went on to gain a degree in automotive engineering and aircraft
construction from the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. He later studied vocational
and business teaching at the University of Hamburg. He lectured production and engineering at
the University of Hamburg from 1981 to 1986. Having gained his doctorate in the areas of
industrial science and polytechnology at the Universities of Hamburg and Kassel in 1986, he
went on to join Messerschmitt-B€olkow-Blohm GmbH (later Daimler-Benz Aerospace or DASA
in 1989).

Andreas Herrmann Prof. Dr. rer. pol., is Full Profes-

sor of Management with a focus on Customer Insight and
Director of the Institute for Customer Insight at the Univer-
sity of St.Gallen (ICI-HSG). Andreas Herrmann has
published on product and price management, on market
research topics, and on branding issues. He has directed
many projects in collaboration with collegues at MIT,
Columbia University, and Stanford University. Beyond his
academic work, he is very much involved in consulting
mainly for the automotive industry.

Harry Hohmeister is a member of the Lufthansa

Group Executive Board, where he is in charge of Hub
Management since January 2016. He was Chief Executive
Officer of Swiss International Air Lines from 2009 until
2015. Hohmeister has over 25 years of experience in the
airline industry. Having trained to become a commercial air
transport officer, Hohmeister joined Deutsche Lufthansa in
1988, where he held various positions and became Vice
President Planning with responsibility for the entire
Lufthansa network in 1996. In 2000, he joined Thomas
Cook Airlines, for whom he held various executive manage-
ment functions in Germany and the UK over the next
5 years. He came to SWISS in 2005, initially as a Member
of the Management Board and Head of Network.
About the Authors xi

Joe Kaeser is President and Chief Executive Officer of

Siemens AG. He has over 30 years of experience at Sie-
mens, where he has held a variety of top management
positions in finance and strategy both inside and outside
Germany. Joe Kaeser began his career at Siemens in 1980
in the field of components and semiconductors. In 1999, he
joined the Corporate Finance Department. In 2001, he was
appointed Chief Financial Officer of the Information and
Communication Mobile Group. From 2004 to 2006, he
served as Siemens’ Chief Strategy Officer. Prior to his
appointment as CEO in August 2013, he was the company’s
Chief Financial Officer for 7 years.

Georges A. Kern grew up in Germany and France. He

studied Political Science in Strasbourg, France, and subse-
quently obtained a degree in Business Administration from
the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. He acquired his
first professional experience in the fast-moving consumer
goods sector at Kraft Foods Switzerland before joining the
Swiss watch industry at TAG Heuer (LVMH group).
In 2000, he joined the Switzerland-based luxury goods
group Richemont, and following the acquisition of A. Lange
& S€ ohne, Jaeger-LeCoultre and IWC, he was active in the
integration of these brands into the company. In 2002, at the
age of 36, he became the youngest CEO within Richemont
when he joined IWC Schaffhausen. In 2017, he was
appointed Head of Watchmaking, Marketing and Digital at
Richemont.
Kern is also committed to charitable causes, serving as a member of the Board of Trustees of
the Laureus Foundation Switzerland, which promotes the use of sport as a tool for social change.
He is also a Founding Curator of the Global Shapers Community in Zurich.

Clemens Trautmann (born 1977 in Braunschweig)

has been President and CEO of Deutsche Grammophon
GmbH, part of Universal Music Group, since December
2015. He previously held various executive roles at Axel
Springer SE, most recently as Chief of Staff to Chairman
and CEO Dr. Mathias D€ opfner, as well as Managing Direc-
tor and CFO of its online property portal, Immonet. In these
roles, he was responsible for a variety of strategic projects
focusing, for example, on digital transformation, new busi-
ness development, corporate acquisitions, innovative man-
agement methods and organisational culture. Clemens
Trautmann earned his doctorate in law while simultaneously
studying music, including at The Juilliard School,
New York. As a member of a European working group on intellectual property, he served on
the research staff of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law. He
has given solo and chamber music performances, for example, at Lincoln Center’s ‘Mostly Mozart
Festival’ and at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall in the ‘Debut on Deutschlandradio’ series and has
been awarded prizes by the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and the German Music Council.
xii About the Authors

Ben van Beurden became Chief Executive Officer of

Royal Dutch Shell plc in January 2014. He joined Shell in
1983, after graduating with a Master’s degree in Chemical
Engineering from Delft University of Technology in the
Netherlands.
Van Beurden’s career at Shell spans both the upstream
and downstream businesses. In January 2005, he became
Vice President, Manufacturing Excellence, based in
Houston, USA. In this role, he was responsible for oper-
ational excellence and initiatives in refining and chemicals
manufacturing.
In December 2006, Van Beurden was appointed Ex-
ecutive Vice President, Chemicals, based in London,
UK. During this time, he was appointed to the boards of a
number of leading industry associations including the International Council of Chemicals Associ-
ation and the European Chemical Industry Council.
In 2013, Van Beurden became Downstream Director and a member of the Executive Commit-
tee, with regional responsibility for Europe and Turkey.

Dieter Zetsche has been a member of the Board of

Management of Daimler AG since 16 December 1998 and
Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG
since 1 January 2006. He is also Head of Mercedes-Benz
Cars. Prior to this, he held various positions in the company,
including President of Mercedes-Benz Argentina (1989),
President of Freightliner Corp. (1991), Member of the
Board of Management with responsibility for Commercial
Vehicles (1999) and CEO of the Chrysler Group (2000).
Dr. Dieter Zetsche was born in Istanbul, Turkey, on
5 May 1953. After attending school in Frankfurt, he studied
electrical engineering from 1971 to 1976 at the University
of Karlsruhe and graduated as an engineer. He joined the
research department of what was then Daimler-Benz AG in
1976. Dr. Zetsche completed a doctorate in engineering in
1982 at the University of Paderborn.
Introduction: Globalization
and the Opening of New Markets

Thomas Bieger, Christoph Franz, and Andreas Herrmann

The “new normal” of negative interest rates in the financial markets, the techno-
logical revolution of Industry 4.0, and the transformation of traditional business
models through the pressure of new digital providers, such developments, which are
challenging all industries, occupy the pages of popular media and management
literature alike. Imagine that you as a young person in this environment had to settle
on a career or that you had to purchase consulting expertise for your organization,
for example, in strategy or management. In light of these generic challenges, there
is much to be said today for deciding in favor of a cross sector, functional career, or
skill set.
As a result of intensified change, industry borders generally seem to be
dissolving. Sectors are merging, and in the wake of business transformation and
business migration, new cross-industry business models are emerging. In academia,
we find a corresponding development in research and teaching away from the
classical industry focused business administration toward a stronger functional or
thematic approach (e.g., gender, governance).
The question is whether traditional sectors and industries are still relevant as
points of reference for the development of career competencies or as objects of
study in academics. How useful to corporate management is the guiding concept of
“sector or industry” in meeting the challenges of today? This book explores these
questions. In the process it takes the reader on a journey through various traditional
sectors, from classical industrial production sectors such as the automotive or
chemical industries through service sectors such as transport, the media, the
consumer goods industry, and the financial sector to research and knowledge
sectors such as the pharmaceutical sector and finally universities. The authors are
Top Executives, CEOs or chairpersons of leading international companies and
organizations whose own careers and professional expertise have been shaped by
various backgrounds. In the fashion of a travelogue, these contemporary witnesses

T. Bieger (*) • C. Franz • A. Herrmann

University of St.Gallen, St.Gallen, Switzerland

# Springer International Publishing AG 2017 1

C. Franz et al. (eds.), Evolving Business Models, Management for Professionals,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48938-4_1
2 T. Bieger et al.

offer a fascinating picture of the transformation of industry sectors that provides

insight into management’s mental map within and between these sectors: The
transitions between the individual sector maps are open and have many common
points of reference and triangulation. Yet, differences in the type of maps, their size,
and other characteristics remain. Differences extend not only to terminology but
also to reference models and finally theoretical approaches.
Sectors and industries have served as a tool for structuring the economy since the
start of the division of labor. Historically, guilds represented industries or branches
and their interests. Today in a time when integrated solutions rather than purely
individual services and products are of increasing importance industries are auto-
matically overlapping and being redefined. The enhancement of traditional services
and products with digital elements—for example, refrigerators that automatically
reorder milk—is reinforcing this trend. In their selection of contributions for this
volume, therefore, the editors have considered sectors characterized not only by
their output but also by their particular industry-specific service provision processes
and their specific economics.
On their voyage of discovery through the various sectors, the editors conclude
that various contextual factors impact the navigation through and across the sectors.
In total, the journey leads through 13 different maps that display remarkable
similarities vis-à-vis their network of coordinates but also show differences in
perspectives and descriptive focus.

• Thomas Bieger, President of the University of St.Gallen—education and

research
• Martin Blessing, former Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors
and Tobias Bange, Vice-President, Commerzbank AG—banking
• Kurt Bock, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, BASF SE—chemical
industry
• Volkmar Denner, Chairman of the Board of Management, Robert Bosch
GmbH—automotive industry
• Jens-Uwe Fischer, Honorary Professor at the Institute for Infrastructure and
Resources Management, University of Leipzig—environmental management
• Christoph Franz, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Roche Holding
AG—pharmaceutical industry
• Rüdiger Grube, former Chairman of the Board, Deutsche Bahn AG—transportation
and logistics
• Harry Hohmeister, Member of the Lufthansa Group Executive Board—aviation
industry
• Joe Kaeser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens AG—large-scale
industry
• Georges Kern, Head of Watchmaking, Marketing and Digital at
Richemont—luxury goods industry
• Clemens Trautmann, President and CEO, Deutsche Grammophon GmbH—
media industry
• Ben van Beurden, Chief Executive Officer, Royal Dutch Shell plc—
petrochemical industry
Introduction: Globalization and the Opening of New Markets 3

• Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management, Daimler AG—automo-

tive industry

Overall, ten findings can be identified:

1. The articles highlight the authors’ current views on various themes and chal-
lenges affecting their respective industries. Remarkably, similar issues and chal-
lenges are found across sectors, albeit with differing intensities. The articles can
be grouped by their various thematic dimensions, in particular by customer
group (B2C, B2B, B2G), by the importance of the drivers of change (global-
ization, regulation, digitalization, other technological innovation stimuli), or,
according to the classical sector breakdown, by the degree of tangibility of the
service (physical goods, services, integrated solutions, knowledge services).
Since the articles could be grouped by conflicting criterias, they were arranged
in simple alphabetical order by author’s last name.

The banking sector, for example, especially the growing field of private banking,
is primarily a B2C business and as a service industry shows similarities to the avi-
ation industry, among others. However, banking is especially strongly affected by
the deregulation/reregulation wave and thus has commonalities with the rail sector.
In terms of tangibility, banking involves abstract products such as consulting ser-
vices in asset management or private banking, which share similarities with
research services. Identifying such structural features helps observers to discern
cross sector developments, and it facilitates cross sector learning (Fig. 1).

2. All sectors are in the midst of a rapid transformation, which is being driven by
globalization, digitalization, deregulation/reregulation, and advances in tech-
nological and scientific innovation. However, the focus and emphasis of these
driving forces vary depending on the sector (Fig. 2).

Customers

Tangibility
B2G
Knowledge service
Integrated solution
B2C
Services

B2B Physical goods

Drivers of change
Globali- Regula- Digitali- Other
zation tion zation sources of
innovation

Fig. 1 Possible approaches to structuring the sector chapters

4 T. Bieger et al.

Sectors Regulation Digitalization Globalization Scientific/technological innovation

Education and research x x

Banking x x
Chemical industry x
Media and Internet x x
Automotive industry suppliers x x
Environmental management x
Pharmaceutical industry x x
Large-scale industry x x
Aviation industry x x
Transportation and logistics x x
Luxury goods industry x
Petrochemical industry x x
Automotive industry x x

Fig. 2 Perceived emphases of the transformation’s driving forces

A sector’s exposure to the various drivers of change or metatrends mainly

depends on the sector-specific service processes, their conditions, and their risks
for the economy and society. Even though Industry 4.0 or digitalization’s potential
is relevant to all branches, it is especially salient in sectors that generate large
volumes of performance-related data, such as research and industry, or in sectors
that produce much consumer-oriented data, such as health care. Deregulation and
reregulation are highly significant for sectors that were previously heavily
dominated by the state, such as education or transport, or where large economic
or societal risks are perceived, such as the financial sector in the wake of the 2007
financial crisis. Globalization mainly affects industries whose service processes are
internationally relocatable and where new production facilities are being opened,
such as in the chemical and aviation sectors. Other sectors such as the pharmaceu-
tical industry or self-driving cars in the automotive industry are being influenced by
paradigmatic advances in scientific innovation. Naturally, these metatrends mutu-
ally influence one another. Thus, for example, globalization generates the need for
new regulations, or digitalization is itself further driven by advances in scientific-
technological innovation.

3. Regulation compels internationally active companies to develop skills for

dealing with different regulatory systems (multiregulation management).
Digitalization is leading to new core functions on both the customer and service
provision sides. The question is how data can be exploited and how processes
linked to customers or products can be reorganized. Globalization is leading to
new distributions of value activities across the world.

a) Regulation
Despite supranational organizations and trade agreements, considerable regu-
latory differences persist across countries. These stem from differences in the
bases of the judicial systems (Roman law, common law) and the various political
cultures (more conservative or liberal) in these countries. Deregulation and
Introduction: Globalization and the Opening of New Markets 5

reregulation processes overlap. This is partly because new markets are always
being opened as a reaction to tighter state budgets and to ensure efficiency, as is
happening in the education and transport sectors. Conversely, some areas are
being more strictly regulated to advance societal interests and to reduce negative
externalities. Reregulation is redefining conditions of competition and market
rules. This is creating an interesting convergence: Services once performed by
the state are being increasingly controlled by competitive elements. For exam-
ple, markets such as the electricity market are being liberalized, and services
such as security or even prisons are being opened to private operators. Con-
versely, traditionally private service areas such as finance or continuing educa-
tion are being increasingly regulated by the state. This is resulting in a tendency
toward the “middle.” More and more, management is moving between pure
market logic and a political-governmental administrative logic. Firms’ profit-
ability is increasingly being determined by the clever use of existing regulations
and to influence the crafting of future ones.

b) Digitalization
Under the term Industry 4.0, digitalization is enabling the reconfiguration of
value chains. The Internet of Things is enabling the realization of streamlined
order processes. The management of production processes is becoming practi-
cally seamless, and robotics is also making it more independent of human
involvement. But digitalization also affects the customer interface. An ever
larger proportion of human activities are leaving traces on the Internet. Big
data systems allow to monitor customer behavior, to analyze it, and even to
anticipate it by calculating probabilities of occurrence of patterns, which is
revolutionizing marketing. Customers can also bundle services according to
their individual preferences. The transport sector offers an illustrative example.
Transport modes can be independently mixed, switching between public trans-
portation and self-driving cars on demand.
Similar customer and service side effects of digitalization can be observed in
various sectors. In health care, diagnostic systems can be combined with infor-
mation systems for patients, thanks to inexpensive sensors. In the financial
sector, new payment systems, uncoupled from cash and thus freed from physical
transactions, are offering customers greater flexibility and lower transaction
costs. This enables optimized capacity utilization of hardware ranging from
automobiles to car parks, as well as warehouses and manufacturing facilities
in traditional production, while sharing models also allow more widespread
usage. Investments will thus also increasingly shift from hardware to software
or processes. The systematic identification of the beneficial, value-adding poten-
tial of digitalization is by this becoming a success factor in practically all
sectors.

c) Globalization
The creation of new markets in the framework of regulation and deregulation,
combined with digitalization, is expanding the potential for the reconfiguration
6 T. Bieger et al.

Fig. 3 Reconfiguration of value chains in global value networks

of value chains. For more and more individual elements of value chains global
markets emerge. For example, in research, services such as a literature review
can be tendered on the global market and procured through “crowdsourcing.”In
nearly all sectors, the increasing potential to separate and globalize value chains
heightens the potential, as well as the pressure, to globally reconfigure value
activities (Fig. 3).

4. As a result, traditional value chains are being reconfigured. On the production

side, cost and quality pressures are driving a focus on the use of technologies
such as small batch (robotic) manufacturing and 3D printing. On the delivery
side, digitalization and the associated combination of physical and other
services open up the possibility of integrating to meet customer needs. There
has been a development away from deterministic “linear” value chains toward
partly situational and flexible value networks. The interdependence of firms and
sectors is thus increasing.

The development toward value networks is leading individual production pro-

cesses with high scalability, for example the manufacture of chemicals, to be
consolidated and globally concentrated into a few centers. Conversely, new
technologies are allowing decentralized production directly at customers’ locations.
Just as with microbreweries previously, 3D printing is emerging as a new technol-
ogy for decentralized production example of spare parts. In such sectors as trans-
port, health care, and increasingly finance, integrators on the consumer side such as
IT platforms in the form of apps are enabling a situational, customer-side integra-
tion of part services into solutions. This concentration of the production of scalable
elements of the value chain the production side and the integration of services on
Introduction: Globalization and the Opening of New Markets 7

the customer side is associated with new business relationships across company and
industry boundaries. This reconfiguration of value creation remains the dominant
engine of change for business models. Consequently, knowledge and development
networks too are becoming more open.

5. The reconfiguration of value creation is not only leading to the transformation of

industry business models and the sectors and industries themselves. Industry
boundaries are shifting in the process of business migration (e.g., between
pure transport and facilitating transport services). However, central value
chain elements (e.g., operation of rail networks, transformation of chemicals)
or categories of customer benefit (e.g., health, education) have remained intact,
and these still determine the core of industries. On the production side, clear
economies exist (e.g., “economies of scale” in the chemical sector, “network
economies” in transport, and “economies of innovation” effects in technology).
Around this core of industries, new business models with new revenue
mechanisms are emerging.

New business models are emerging in particular in connection with transaction

platforms such as Airbnb or Amazon and other social media platforms like
LinkedIn that focus on careers and personal profiles. Because of the data they
generate and their networks, such platforms have the potential to develop to new
and powerful players in and across industries like career platform thus develop to
recruitment agencies and thus to compete with traditional headhunting or to become
transaction sites for continuing education that compete with training providers.
They may even provide salary comparisons and consulting, areas of activity
previously associated with traditional sectors.
Along with these new cross sector business models, new revenue mechanisms
are also emerging. When customers freely combine diagnoses and therapies or
transport networks, transparency and a results orientation ensue. This allows a shift
in value capturing from charging the cost of individual performance elements to a
customer value based perspective and by this a move in pricing from an input and
cost orientation to a results or success orientation. Transaction platforms likewise
enable service comparisons, for example, in the sourcing of research services. This
further increases the pressure on costs and utilization of economies.
The core of industry expertise therefore always has been and will be understand-
ing the needs of the customers, and/or the expertise in specific provision processes.
For example, in the automotive sector, passenger compartments can and have to be
designed around customers’ needs; in the chemical sector, production can be
optimized in form of capacity utilization.

6. The proper blend of general management competence and industry expertise

depends on the challenges a sector or firm is currently facing. Industry expertise
tends to be more important the higher the cost and efficiency pressure, sector-
specific regulation, or dependence on sector-specific fixed assets.
8 T. Bieger et al.

The transformation of business models across industry boundaries is creating the

need for “hybrid” management skills. On the one hand, industry expertise is neces-
sary for a specific customer orientation and for the “core,” the value chain element,
which is still rooted in the industry. Thus, specialized knowledge and solidly based
management experience in the respective industry is needed. For example, engi-
neering expertise is necessary in the insurance sector for the evaluation and
assessment of risks, and rail-specific operational know-how is required in the
railway sector. Running an expert organization too, for example, directing a
university, requires the manager to be rooted in the respective core sector, not
least to ensure the staff’s acceptance of his or her leadership. Nevertheless, in terms
of value networks, this expertise must be combined with general management
competence or expertise in additional sectors. For instance, IT skills are necessary
to transform a railway company into an integrated transport service enterprise. In
the future, corporate management teams may thus become more diverse in terms of
their industry backgrounds.

7. In the future, the challenge for management—and for governance—will include

more than just sensibly combining general management competence with indus-
try expertise. It will also involve meaningfully shaping the transformation of
business models and thus, within the same company, contending with the contra-
dictions inherent in partly diverging business models and ultimately multiple
industry logics as well. This is especially so since the impetus for innovation
frequently originates externally, in other companies or other industries.

Industries also tend to distinguish themselves from one another culturally.

Examples include industry symbols (traditionally saints such as St. Barbara in
mining) or distinctive professional title structures as in universities. Specific termi-
nology and schools of thought also emerge from industries. This development is
reinforced by sector-specific continuing education programs. The advantages of
these industry cultures should not be viewed solely in the context of the evolution of
industry expertise and a focus on the economies involved in that sector’s value
creation. Affiliation with an industry also provides workers with an orientation and
a sense of meaning. For many, their industry also is an important source of identity.
Yet, in the context of newly structured, cross-industry value creation systems
and business models, the impetus for continued development and innovation in the
form of push effects (competition) or pull effects (e.g., new technological
possibilities) often arises from external sources, even ones outside the specific
sector. Balancing between concentrated sector rationality and permitting or partly
even enforcing the opening of structures represent a tightrope act for management.
Linking production culture in the industry with a digital design culture that has
entirely different quality requirements—and fault tolerance—is just as challenging
as combining traditional banking with e-banking. The process of transforming
business models is thus also to be understood in the proper sense as supporting
and shaping cultural projects. It requires management to contend with various
conflicting rationalities.
Introduction: Globalization and the Opening of New Markets 9

8. (Consolidated) industries are always dominated by large companies. The authors

of this book thus represent large companies, some of which are global leaders in
their industries. All are being confronted with the fundamental question of
how they as incumbents should shape the transformation, which again requires
dealing with such contradictions as change and stabilize.

The authors of this book represent companies, which command significant

market shares in their respective industries. Large, established companies in the
classical sectors, so-called incumbents, use various means to integrate newcomers.
These range from the purchase of technology firms and their gradual integration
(as in the pharmaceutical industry), the development of innovation networks for
innovative teaching methods in universities, to the establishment of disruptive pilot
departments with innovative content within the companies themselves. In this
sense, the reconfiguration of value chains always raises the question of
reconfiguring the company and ensuring synergies across business units.

9. Corporate management in classical industries thus needs to be capable of

continuously and incrementally advancing the capacities and potential of the
company creatively and with value orientation. At the same time, it must be able
to recognize disruptive changes (e.g., challenges by newcomers such as Airbnb
in the hotel industry) and to assess their long-term effect and if promising
leapfrog and adapt to them in a revolution style.

If management puts too much emphasis on innovative trends, it runs the risk of
causing fragmentation into a multitude of ever-changing initiatives. Companies’
need to identify relevant “metatrends” with long-term influence on the sector and
adopt to them without loss of core competencies their industry. Examples include
the automotive sector or the transport sector as a whole, where new digital offerings
and new forms of coordination or information are arising in rapid succession.

10. The basic contradiction is between further optimizing existing business models
and potentials, which continue to sustain companies, and on the other hand
vigorously implementing innovations. Navigating this contradiction represents
a particular challenge for corporate management. Orientation (where does the
path lead through which stages, how to understand inconsistencies), sense-
making (why must I/my department work on this now), and the formation of
culture (how can tradition and innovation be culturally shaped) are all crucial
to winning the support of employees and other stakeholders such as investors
on the path to new business models.

Overall, navigating contradictions or managing ambiguities constitutes a par-

ticular challenge for management in the age of digitalization. How can the virtues
of the traditional high standards of quality and reliability be preserved while
10 T. Bieger et al.

simultaneously maintaining openness to and experiencing with new digital

solutions from the Internet of Things? How can companies further develop tradi-
tional vehicles, while at the same time and in the same organization they are
developing new transport solutions with the cooperation of partners from
completely different industries? Such percieved contradictions must be addressed
and made transparent to employees, shareholders, and the public. Only thus can we
ensure proper orientation in times of change. This is absolutely necessary if the
transformation is to be achieved with the cooperation of employees and
stakeholders.
Transformation of Teaching and Research
in a Globalized IT-Driven World
From State-Dominated Hierarchical Structures
to Public-Private Open Network Approaches

Thomas Bieger

1 Chapter 1: Teaching and Research (The Traditional

Paradigm as a Starting Point)

The focus of this contribution is on teaching and research, in particular their

symbiosis in research-based learning at universities. By this it deals with the function
of “teaching and research” in a specific “industry,” the university sector. The
university sector is very broad and includes different types of universities—rather
applied and college type of institutions of rather regional rank but also institutions
focusing on fundamental research with a global reach. This sector includes roughly
16,500 institutions worldwide, of which just the top 500 appear in the rankings (see
Rauhvargers 2011), and is fast growing in size as well as scope.
Teaching and research are activities that by their very nature allow people to
advance into new areas and to tread what is at least for them terra incognita and by
this constitute real experiences (for the definition and concept of experiences, see
Schulze 2005). For this reason, teaching and learning, as well as research, are not
just cognitive but also emotional and thus run deeper than other general or knowl-
edge services. Mental images of how one experienced teaching and learning, how
one achieved first research results as a young researcher and experienced discovery
and understanding, are thus formative for life.
In nearly all cases, at least those with complex content, research and teaching
require an interaction between various actors: students, teachers, or research
partners, as well as infrastructure providers or consumers and users of research
results. Teaching and research thus entail an extraordinary, interdependent system
of service provision. In addition, research activities usually produce open output and
operate in open systems. These features, the creativity required for research activities
as well as the particularity and number of the participants involved, mean that

T. Bieger (*)
University of St.Gallen, St.Gallen, Switzerland

# Springer International Publishing AG 2017 11

C. Franz et al. (eds.), Evolving Business Models, Management for Professionals,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48938-4_2
12 T. Bieger

research can only to a limited extent be actively managed as a discrete process to a

limited extent. This is in stark contrast to many other service processes, which can be
centrally managed and optimized as service chains.
Teaching and research can therefore be modeled and described with the help of a
systems approach (for activity systems, or generally for systems approaches using
the example of tourism, see Bieger (2010)). There is a debate within management
research over whether a high interdependence tends to lead to inertia in adapting to
new environmental conditions or whether this mutual dependence helps facilitate
an incremental adjustment process. In investigating this question, it is important to
find a suitable interplay between structures on the one hand and rules governing
cooperation on the other hand (cf. the discussion in Albert et al. 2014).
The traditional system of teaching and research, as most people likely still
remember it, can be viewed as rather hierarchically structured and molded by the
state. A lecturer, most prominently the full professor in Latin often called Amplis-
simus, structures learning processes and mostly selects and processes the knowl-
edge he or she then transmits. Research processes are similarly organized: a senior
researcher structures a research project into research questions and coordinates the
knowledge gained. Humboldt’s model of academic chairs—still primarily domi-
nant in German-speaking Europe—perfectly captures this world (cf., e.g.,
Backhaus 2015). The full professor holds a chair, and, as still commonly provided
for in university bylaws, he or she heads a sub discipline at a university in teaching
and research. The system moved toward a “fragmentation” into a myriad of
subdisciplines (cf. Herrigel, p. 13, in Thomä 2012), driven not least by the full
professors who could thereby stake their claim in the demarcated disciplines. In
this hierarchy, the lecturers’, associate, adjunct and assistant professors are
hierarchically subordinate to the full professors, and under them are the assistants
and doctoral students.
In these classical scientific networks, the professors exchanged their findings
among each other. They were the real “hubs” of scientific work. Between these
hubs, implicit hierarchies were again established within the research themes and
cultural areas. In each country or language area, each discipline had its clearly
dominant researcher, whose findings would serve as a guideline for the others
and whom they would accordingly cite. Qualifying as a postdoc under these
prominent researchers increased the chances of being appointed as a full professor,
since these leading researchers were often members of advisory committees at
other universities. The full professors were (and still are) granted lifetime employ-
ment with the idea of thereby securing their academic independence and enabling
long-term-oriented research perspectives.
In this system, the owner and founder of the educational and research institutions
was the state. This had a threefold aim, first to keep access to the educational insti-
tution open to broad segments of the population through governmental access rule
and subsidies, second to keep teaching and research independent from private
money and interests to guarantee academic freedom, and third to also effectively
support the research disciplines and profit from the knowledge they generated. This
Transformation of Teaching and Research in a Globalized IT-Driven World 13

was a dominant model in particular from the advent of the nation-state until the end
of the Cold War. Nation-states needed access to knowledge, for example, for the
development of their national infrastructure such as railway networks or the further
development of their institutional systems like school and legal system. This they
secured through the establishment of full universities since Bologna in the eleventh
century and specialized universities, such as the institutes of technology around the
middle of the nineteenth century. In Switzerland, for example, the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology (ETH) played this role. Subsequently, at the end of that
century, business schools and universities of economics and social sciences were
founded, in Switzerland the University of St.Gallen (HSG).
Historically, public research funding of a wealth of large research areas—today
many of them classified as purely private sector research areas—was vital and
should not be underestimated. The emergence of the World Wide Web as well as
Silicon Valley as the cradle of the IT industry can so be traced back to the large
public (defense) research programs during the Cold War (see Lanz 2015). The
dominance of the state leads to various additional by-products such as reverse
selection in the admission process, by which public schools, for example, the
high school/gymnasium through the administration of the university qualifying
exam, had the power to decide who could enter the next level of education. The
universities, led by the same state, had to accept successful graduates of these
gymnasiums accordingly.
The emergence of typical research careers and life paths at universities can also
be largely attributed to public regulation of the sector. The career path from under-
graduate to master’s and doctoral student, postdoc, and habilitation through to
tenured professorship is a typical expression of this. Lifelong employment of
even nonprofessorial teaching staff, for example, “academic councils,” reflects
the influence of the governmental civil service.
The hierarchical structure of the activity system “research and teaching” (see
Fig. 1) clearly also contributed to important successes in a very specific contextual
environment:

• In the period of the nation-state’s dominance, the state was in the best position to
finance critical research budgets. This was particularly the case with the growth
of the public spending ratio in nearly all industrialized countries after WWI until
the end of the Cold War in 1990.
• In a period of technologies which just allowed point-to-point communication
using letters, telephones, or physical printed matter, communication between
system heads, like full professors as hubs, was often the only way to diffuse ideas
and findings over national and system boundaries.
• In a time of complex access to knowledge with limited space at universities and
labor-intensive search processes in physical card catalogs in libraries, it made
sense for the best informed people to select, process, and transmit knowledge.

The question is, to what extent has the environment changed and with it the
conditions for teaching and research? And to what extent does the activity system of
14 T. Bieger

System boundaries,
e.g. language areas

Chair

Assistants
Postdocs

Fig. 1 Traditional activity system of teaching and research (own presentation)

teaching and research have to adapt, to this new environment? And is it capable to
adopt?

2 Chapter 2: Changes in the Environment (Drivers

of a Transformation)

The St.Gallen Management Model conceives the environment/the context of an

organization as a resource space of options (cf. Rüegg-Stürm and Grand 2015). For
each organization or function, resources must be optimally configured to become
strategic success factors. A firm’s environment includes the natural, social, techno-
logical, and economic environment. Changes in these areas require a reorientation
to new strategic success factors and a reconfiguration of value-creation processes.
For teaching and research, the following developments are especially important:

1. Technological development: In the first phase from the mid-1990s, the Internet
enabled a global networking of researchers. Information could be exchanged at
virtually no cost directly from point to point, between individual researchers
worldwide. English established itself as the “lingua franca” in science; language
areas became porous. In this process, the classical star-shaped network structure
characteristic of the “professor” system was replaced by a grid network (see
Fig. 2). No longer did professors as hubs of their research groups channel in
some cases and even monopolize information streams. Opportunities to engage
in collaborative research and prepare joint publications became a common good
available to every level of an academic career. In a process of democratization of
information sovereignty, all at once it was possible for a doctoral student to
collaborate directly with a postdoc working on the same topic on another
Transformation of Teaching and Research in a Globalized IT-Driven World 15

Chair

Postdocs
Assistants

Fig. 2 Modern activity system of teaching and research in a global network (own presentation)

continent. Position as the key asset in academic research networks was replaced
by knowledge on specific topics.
In the second phase from 2010, huge quantities of data became available in all
economic and social realms affected by digitalization. For example, it was no
longer necessary to collect consumer data using representative surveys. Through
analyses of real demand data, such as purchases or information retrieval on the
Internet, one had almost instant online access to individual and collective behav-
ioral data. Empirical research moved from surveys and behavior lab experiments
to big data analysis. Data are thus no longer the exclusive province of univer-
sities, which they collect on sample basis at great cost. They are distributed
across company networks or purchasable on global search engines. Their analysis
requires advanced algorithms and large computing/coding capacities. This is
tending to increase the critical mass for research projects and is making new
partnerships necessary, often between universities and companies.
The general access to knowledge is also changing learning behavior of the
students. Students are increasingly learning from concrete tasks for which they
download the necessary knowledge directly from the Internet. By this role of
academic teachers is also changing. They not anymore select, channel, and
prepare knowledge; they rather coach knowledge acquisition processes. They
do not stand anymore between the students and the knowledge as quasi
gatekeepers. Like coaches for the tasks, they are structuring the learning pro-
cesses and moderating access to knowledge. Here too, network approaches are
16 T. Bieger

becoming more important. Students work together on specific tasks, often with
colleagues from other universities and knowledge partners for practice from all
around the world. Collaborative learning (cf. Bruffee 1999) is becoming corre-
spondingly more important. A campus’ focus is no longer centered on research
offices and separate lecture halls, but rather on inspiring multifunctional meeting
rooms for students, instructors, and researchers, often in the form of labs like
design labs (cf. design thinking Brenner and Uebernickel 2016) or special
IT-supported learning environments such as trading rooms.
2. Socioeconomic environment: Because of globalization, competition is intensi-
fying not only in the real economy but also between places and finally with the
opening of markets for skilled labor for talents. High-cost locations in particular
are under increasing pressure to boost their productivity and deliver value added.
In the process of creative destruction (see Schumpeter and Seifert 1993) in the
interplay between innovation and imitation, firms must continuously increase
and enhance their competences. Only when firms using superior competences
manage to provide individual goods and services of better quality and/or less
expensively than other firms and other locations is their economic survival
assured.
It is evident that because of the importance of intangible knowledge, the
creative advancement of economic activities can be best pursued through per-
sonal exchange in clusters, supported by creative milieus (see Florida 2012). In
this effort, companies seek collaboration with the most capable people and thus
also locate their knowledge and research departments in places with strong
knowledge clusters. Consequently in an effort to strengthen their competitive
position places, countries and cities invest in the development of university
activities, for example, by founding new institutions or acquiring subsidiaries
of existing institutions.
This continuous improvement of their own capabilities as high-value and hard
working labor is also important for specialists and managers (see Harford 2015).
Thanks to the new information and communications technologies, knowledge
workers can become more effective, for example, by making their ideas or
concepts quickly accessible to a broader public and by achieving greater pro-
ductivity and ultimately high incomes. In the network society, the expression
“the winner takes it all” carries considerable weight (see Frank and Cook 1995).
Those who quickly and consistently dominate an area of knowledge or compe-
tence set the standards and often exclusively command the highest returns (see
Shapiro and Varian 2013) and productivity as well as salary differences increase.
In consequence, places, universities, and research institutions compete for the
most talented people and, symbiotically, research partnerships with the most
competitive companies or public institutions in their field. And talents want to
maintain their capability levels by having access to high-rated knowledge
streams and lifelong learning. Conversely, there are new markets in lifelong
continuing education and qualification for alumni.
In this knowledge economy, there are also huge self-reinforcing effects. Good
research partnerships make an institution attractive for outstanding researchers
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The biography
of a baby
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The biography of a baby

Author: Milicent Washburn Shinn

Release date: September 26, 2023 [eBook #71734]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1900

Credits: Tim Lindell, Turgut Dincer, David E. Brown, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

BIOGRAPHY OF A BABY ***
 THE BIOGRAPHY
OF
A BABY
BY
MILICENT WASHBURN SHINN

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY MILICENT WASHBURN SHINN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED
IN THE U. S. A.
 CONTENTS
PAGE
I. Baby Biographies in General 1
II. The New-born Baby: Structure and Movements 20
III. The New-born Baby: Sensations and Consciousness 39
IV. The Earliest Developments 58
Beginnings of Emotion and Progress in Sense
V. 78
Powers
VI. Progress toward Grasping 99
She learns to grasp, and discovers the World of
VII. 118
Things
VIII. The Era of Handling Things 141
IX. The Dawn of Intelligence 161
X. Beginnings of Locomotion 182
XI. Creeping and Standing 203
Rudiments of Speech; Climbing and Progress toward
XII. 224
Walking
XIII. Walking Alone; Developing Intelligence 238
 THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BABY

I
BABY BIOGRAPHIES IN GENERAL

“It is a well recognized fact in the history of science that the very
subjects which concern our dearest interests, which lie nearest our
hearts, are exactly those which are the last to submit to scientific
methods, to be reduced to scientific law. Thus it has come to pass
that while babies are born and grow up in every household, and
while the gradual unfolding of their faculties has been watched with
the keenest interest and intensest joy by intelligent and even
scientific fathers and mothers from time immemorial, yet very little
has yet been done in the scientific study of this most important of all
possible subjects—the ontogenetic evolution of the faculties of the
human mind.
“Only in the last few years has scientific attention been drawn to the
subject at all. Its transcendent importance has already enlisted many
observers, but on account of the great complexity of the phenomena,
and still more the intrinsic difficulty of their interpretation, scientific
progress has scarcely yet commenced.
“What is wanted most of all in this, as in every science, is a body of
carefully observed facts. But to be an accomplished investigator in
this field requires a rare combination of qualities. There must be a
wide intelligence combined with patience in observing and honesty in
recording. There must be also an earnest scientific spirit, a loving
sympathy with the subject of investigation, yet under watchful
restraint, lest it cloud the judgment; keenness of intuitive perception,
yet soberness of judgment in interpretation.”
I have appropriated these words of Dr. Joseph Le Conte because the
general reader is not likely to see them where they were originally
printed, in a little university study, and it is a pity to let the general
reader miss so good an introduction to the subject. Not all learned
men rate baby biography as highly as Dr. Le Conte does; but
probably all biologists do, and those psychologists who are most
strongly impressed with the evolutionary interpretation of life.
It is easy to see why one’s views of evolution affect the matter. In
botany, for instance, we do not think that we can understand the
mature plant by studying it alone, without knowledge of its
germinating period. If we omitted all study of radicle and plumule and
cotyledon, we should not only lose an interesting chapter from the
science, but even the part we kept, the classification and morphology
and physiology of the grown plant itself, would be seriously
misunderstood in some ways. So in other sciences: it is necessary to
understand how things came to be what they are, to study the
process of becoming, so to speak, before the completed result can
be understood. This is what we mean by “the genetic method” of
studying a subject.
Now, in proportion as one believes that the faculties of the human
mind unfold by evolutionary law, like a plant from the germ, he will
feel the need of studying these also genetically. As we find them in
our grown selves, they are often perplexing. What seems a single
complete, inborn faculty may really be made up of simpler ones, so
fused together by long practice that they cannot be discerned. We
know that this is the case with seeing. For instance, we give a glance
at a ball, and see its form with a single act of mind. Yet that act
became possible only after long drill in putting simpler perceptions
together. Many a test of form, turning objects over and over, passing
the hands round and round them, learning the absence of corners,
the equality of diameters, did we go through in babyhood, many an
inspection by eye, many an exercise of memory, connecting the
peculiar arrangement of light and shade with the form as felt, before
we could “see” a ball. Had this been understood in Froebel’s time, it
would have made a material difference in his suggestions as to
sense training in earliest infancy. So other powers that seem simple
and inborn may perhaps be detected in the act of forming
themselves out of simpler ones, if we watch babies closely enough,
and it may lead us to revise some of our theories about education.
There are enthusiasts, indeed, who would have us believe that child
study is going to revolutionize all our educational methods, but those
who are surest of these wonderful results, and readiest to tell
mothers and teachers what is the truly scientific thing to do with their
children, are not the ones who have done the most serious first hand
study of children. From indications so far, it is likely that the outcome
of such study will oftener be to confirm some good old-fashioned
ways of training (showing that they rested unconsciously on a sound
psychological basis) than to discover new ways. No substitute has
yet been found by scientific pedagogy for motherly good sense and
devotion.
Yet the direct study of child minds does bring out some new
suggestions of educational value, does give a verdict sometimes
between old conflicting theories, and always makes us understand
more clearly what we are doing with children. And on the purely
scientific side there is one aspect of especial interest in genetic
studies. That is, the possible light we may get on the past of the
human race.
It has long been observed that there are curious resemblances
between babies and monkeys, between boys and barbaric tribes.
Schoolboys administer law among themselves much as a tribal court
does; babies sit like monkeys, with the soles of their little feet facing
each other. Such resemblances led, long before the age of Darwin,
to the speculation that children in developing passed through stages
similar to those the race had passed through; and the speculation
has become an accepted doctrine since embryology has shown how
each individual before birth passes in successive stages through the
lower forms of life.
This series of changes in the individual is called by evolutionists the
Ontogenic Series; and the similar series through which the race has
passed in the myriads of ages of its evolution is called the
Phylogenic.
Now, of these two versions of the great world history, the phylogenic
is a worn and ancient volume, mutilated in many places, and often
illegible. The most interesting chapter of all is torn out—that which
records the passing over of man from brute to human, the beginning
of true human reason, speech, and skill. The lowest living races are
far beyond the transition line; the remains of the past can never tell
us how it was crossed, for before man could leave anything more
than bones—any products of his art, such as weapons, or signs of
fire—he had traveled a long way from his first human condition.
But from the ontogenic record no chapter can be torn out: a fresh
copy of the whole history, from alpha to omega, is written out every
time an infant is conceived, and born, and grows to manhood. And
somewhere on the way between the first cell of the embryo and
maturity each one must repeat in his own life that wonderful
transition into human intelligence. If we can thoroughly decipher tills
ontogenic record, then, what may we not hope to learn of the road by
which we human beings came?
We must not forget that the correspondence between these life
books is only a rough one. They are versions of the same world
story, but they have traveled far from their common origin, and have
become widely unlike in details. The baby has to take many short
cuts, and condense and omit inconceivably, to get through in a few
brief years a development that the race took ages for. Even the order
of development gets disarranged sometimes. For instance, primitive
man probably reached a higher development before he could talk
than babies have to now, after ages of talking ancestry: we must not
look to a child just learning to talk, to get an idea of what the minds
of men were like when they were just learning to talk. Again, the
human child is carrying on under the influence of adults an evolution
that primitive man worked out without help or hindrance from any
one wiser than himself; and that makes a great difference in the way
he does it.
The moral of all this is that people should be very cautious indeed in
drawing parallels between the child and the race, and especially in
basing educational theories on them. But if one is cautious enough
and patient enough, there are many hints about our race history to
be found in every nursery. Some of these I shall relate in the
following chapters.

Most studies of children deal with later childhood, the school years;
and these are almost always statistical in their method, taking the
individual child very little into account. My own study has been of
babyhood, and its method has been biographical. It is hard to get
statistics about babies, scattered as they are, one by one, in different
homes, not massed in schoolrooms. Now and then a doctor has
found material for good comparative investigations, and much effort
has been spent in trying to gather up measurements of babies’
growth; but on the whole the most fruitful method so far has been the
biographical one—that of watching one baby’s development, day by
day, and recording it.
I am often asked if the results one gets in this way are not
misleading, since each child might differ greatly from others. One
must, of course, use great caution in drawing general conclusions
from a single child, but in many things all babies are alike, and one
learns to perceive pretty well which are the things. Babyhood is
mainly taken up with the development of the large, general racial
powers; individual differences are less important than in later
childhood. And the biographical method of child study has the
inestimable advantage of showing the process of evolution going on,
the actual unfolding of one stage out of another, and the steps by
which the changes come about. No amount of comparative statistics
could give this. If I should find out that a thousand babies learned to
stand at an average age of forty-six weeks and two days, I should
not know as much that is important about standing, as a stage in
human progress, as I should after watching a single baby carefully
through the whole process of achieving balance on his little soles.
Yet there are not many baby biographies in existence. There are
scarcely half a dozen records that are full and consecutive enough to
be at all entitled to the name, and even of more fragmentary ones
the number in print as separate essays is scarcely larger. A good
many more, however, have been available in manuscript to students,
and many mothers no doubt keep such little notebooks. These notes
are often highly exact and intelligent, as far as they go (I have found
this especially true of the notebooks of members of the Association
of Collegiate Alumnæ), and afford important corroborations here and
there to more continuous records.
It was the Germans who first thought baby life worth recording, and
the most complete and scientific of all the records is a German one.
The first record known was published in the last century by a
Professor Tiedemann—a mere slip of an essay, long completely
forgotten, but resuscitated about the middle of this century,
translated into French (and lately into English), and used by all
students of the subject. Some of its observations we must, with our
present knowledge, set down as erroneous; but it is on the whole
exact and valuable, and a remarkable thing for a man to have done
more than a hundred years ago.
Perhaps Darwin, in 1840, was the next person to take notes of an
infant’s development; but they were taken only incidentally to
another study, and were not published for more than thirty years
(partly in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,”
1873, partly in a magazine article in 1877). They are scanty but
important. In the interval before they were published two or three
small records had been published in Germany, and at least one
paper, that of M. Taine, in France.
In 1881, the first edition of Professor Preyer’s “model record” was
published, and before his death, in 1897, it had reached its third
edition in Germany, and had been widely circulated in America in Mr.
Brown’s excellent translation, “The Senses and the Will,” and “The
Development of the Intellect.” It did more to stimulate and direct the
study of infancy than any other publication. It has, however, the
limitations that were to be expected from Professor Preyer’s special
training as a physiologist, and is meagre on the side of mental,
moral, and emotional development. Professor Sully’s “Extracts from
a Father’s Diary,” published in part in 1881 and 1884 and fully in
1896, is richer on these sides, and also more readable.
Within the present decade, it is worth observing, the principal
records have been American, not German, and have been written by
women. Outside of America, only men, usually university professors,
have made extended records. Professor Preyer and Professor Sully
have both appealed in vain to their countrywomen to keep such
records, holding up American women for emulation. My “Notes on
the Development of a Child” were published in 1893 and 1899. In
1896 appeared Mrs. Hall’s “The First 500 Days of a Child’s Life,” a
brief record, and confined to a short period, but a very good one, and
perhaps the best for use as a guide by any one who wishes to keep
a record and finds Preyer too technical. Mrs. Moore’s “Mental
Development of a Child” is quite as much a psychological study as a
record, but is based on full biographical notes; it will be more used
by students than general readers. Mrs. Hogan’s “A Study of a Child,”
1898, is less scholarly than the others, but has a great deal of useful
material; it does not begin at birth, however, but with the fourteenth
month.
Perhaps I should say a word here as to the way in which I came to
make a baby biography, for I am often asked how one should go to
work at it. It was not done in my case for any scientific purpose, for I
did not feel competent to make observations of scientific value. But I
had for years desired an opportunity to see the wonderful unfolding
of human powers out of the limp helplessness of the new-born baby;
to watch this fascinating drama of evolution daily, minutely, and with
an effort to understand it as far as I could, for my own pleasure and
information. I scarcely know whence the suggestion had come;
probably almost by inheritance, for my mother and grandmother had
both been in somewhat notable degree observers of the
development of babies’ minds. But, unlike them, I had the notebook
habit from college and editorial days, and jotted things down as I
watched, till quite unexpectedly I found myself in possession of a
large mass of data.
A few days after my own notes began I obtained Professor Preyer’s
record, and without it I should have found the earliest weeks quite
unintelligible. For some months my notes were largely memoranda
of the likenesses and differences between my niece’s development
and that of Preyer’s boy, and I still think this is the best way for a new
observer to get started. As time went on, I departed more and more
from the lines of Preyer’s observations, and after the first year was
little influenced by them. Later, I devoted a good deal of study to the
notes, and tried to analyze their scientific results.
There is one question that I have been asked a hundred times about
baby biography: “Doesn’t it do the children some harm? Doesn’t it
make them nervous? Doesn’t it make them self-conscious?” At first
this seemed to me an odd misapprehension—as if people supposed
observing children meant doing something to them. But I have no
doubt it could be so foolishly managed as to harm the child. There
are thousands of parents who tell anecdotes about children before
their faces every day in the year, and if such a parent turns child
student it is hard to say what he may not do in the way of dissecting
a child’s mind openly, questioning the little one about himself, and
experimenting with his thoughts and feelings. But such observing is
as worthless scientifically as it is bad for the child: the whole value of
an observation is gone as soon as the phenomena observed lose
simplicity and spontaneity. It should be unnecessary to say that no
competent observer tampers with the child in any way. If Professor
Preyer, observing the baby as he first grasps at objects, notes down
the way in which he misdirects his inexpert little hands; if Mrs. Barus
keeps record of her boy’s favorite playthings; if I sit by the window
and catch with my pencil my niece’s prattle as she plays about below
—and if these babies afterward turn out spoiled, the mischief must
be credited to some other agency than the silent notebook.
Even direct experimenting on a child is not so bad as it sounds.
When you show a baby his father’s photograph to see if he
recognizes it, you are experimenting on him. The only difference
between the child student’s experimenting and that which all the
members of the family are doing all day with the baby, is that the
student knows better what he is trying to find out, and that he writes
it down.
Probably women are more skillful than men in quietly following the
course of the child’s mind, even leading him to reveal himself without
at all meddling with him or marring his simplicity. It has been so in a
marked degree in the cases I have seen. But no one who has good
judgment will allow himself to spoil both the child and his own
observation; and any one who has not good judgment will find plenty
of ways to spoil a child more potent than observing him.
 II
THE NEW-BORN BABY: STRUCTURE AND
MOVEMENTS.

“Its first act is a cry, not of wrath, as Kant said, nor a shout of joy, as
Schwartz thought, but a snuffling, and then long, thin, tearless á—á,
with the timbre of a Scotch bagpipe, purely automatic, but of
discomfort. With this monotonous and dismal cry, with its red,
shriveled, parboiled skin (for the child commonly loses weight the
first few days), squinting, cross-eyed, pot-bellied, and bow-legged, it
is not strange that, if the mother has not followed Froebel’s
exhortations and come to love her child before birth, there is a brief
interval occasionally dangerous to the child before the maternal
instinct is fully aroused.”
It cannot be denied that this unflattering description is fair enough,
and our baby was no handsomer than the rest of her kind. The little
boy uncle, who had been elated to hear that his niece resembled
him, looked shocked and mortified when he saw her. Yet she did not
lack admirers. I have never noticed that women (even those who are
not mothers) mind a few little æsthetic defects, such as these that
President Hall mentions, with so many counterbalancing charms in
the little warm, soft, living thing.
Nor is it women only who find the new baby enchanting—in
Germany, at least. Semmig, whose “Tagebuch eines Vaters” is one
of the earliest attempts at a record, is delighted even with the “dismal
and monotonous cry.” “Heavenly music of the first cry!” he exclaims,
“sacred voice of life, first sound of the poem of a heart, first note of
the symphony of human life, thou echo of God’s word! What sound is
like unto thee?” “Yes, it is so: the cry of the baby is music! When it is
still, especially in the night, one is uneasy; one longs for this primitive
expression of the little being, and is consoled, enraptured, when the
helpless creature breaks into loud wails, and says to us: I live, give
me what I need! Oh, cry of the baby in the night, nightingale song for
mother and father!”
Our baby was at least a handsome one from the doctor’s point of
view, strong, healthy, and well formed; and this is to be taken into
account as a determining factor in all the record that follows.
I thought that she must be out of the normal in the matter of legs, so
oddly brief were the fat little members. Afterward I learned that all
babies are built that way—and indeed that they are altogether so
different in structure from the grown man that Dr. Oppenheim, in his
book on “The Development of the Child,” comes near to saying that
we must regard the infant as a different animal form from the adult,
almost as the caterpillar is different from the butterfly. Common
speech recognizes this in the case of several of the higher animals,
naming the young form as differently as if it were a different species.
We say a colt, a calf, a puppy, a baby; not a young horse, cow, dog,
or man.
We call a baby a little copy of the man, but really if he were
magnified to man’s size and strength, we should regard him at first
glance as an idiot and monster, with enormous head and abdomen,
short legs, and no neck, not to speak of the flat-nosed, prognathous
face; and on the other hand, a baby that was really a small copy of
man’s body would seem positively uncanny. We see this in old
pictures, where the artist tried to depict babies by placing small-sized
men and women in the mother’s arms.
The middle point of the baby’s length falls a little above the navel,
the abdomen and legs together making up a little more than half the
whole length; in the man the legs alone make a trifle more than half.
In proportion to the baby’s total weight, its brain weighs seven times
as much as a grown person’s, its muscles little more than half as
much.
“The two [man and baby] do not breathe alike, their pulse rates are
not alike, the composition of their bodies is not alike.” The baby’s
body at birth is 74.7 per cent. water, ours 58.5 per cent. It is largely
due to its loose, watery structure that the baby’s brain is so heavy—
which shows the folly of trying to compare mental powers by means
of brain weights, as is so often done in discussing woman’s sphere.
As Donaldson says, if there were anything in that basis of
comparison, the new-born baby would be the intellectual master of
us all. The baby has bright red and watery marrow, instead of the
yellow, fatty substance in our bones; and its blood differs so from
ours in proportion of red and white corpuscles and in chemical make-
up as to “amount almost to a difference in kind,” says Dr.
Oppenheim, who adds that such a condition of marrow or blood, if
found in a grown person, would be considered an indication of
disease.
The organs are differently placed within the body, and even
differently formed. The bony structure is everywhere soft and
unfinished, the plates of the skull imperfectly fitted together, with
gaps at the corners; and it is well that they are, for if the brain box
were closed tight the brain within could never grow. Surgeons have
lately even made artificial openings where the skull was prematurely
perfect, to save the baby from idiocy. The bony inclosures of the
middle ear are quite unfinished, so that on the one side catarrhal
inflammations from the nose and throat travel up to the ear more
readily than in later life, while on the other side ear inflammations are
more likely to pass into the brain. The spine is straight, like an ape’s,
instead of having the double curve of human-kind, which seems to
be brought about by the pull of the muscles after we have come to
stand erect.
I have quoted these details from Oppenheim, and from Vierordt’s
and Roberts’s measurements, as given by Dr. Burk (“Growth of
Children in Height and Weight.”) Some of the figures are given
otherwise by other authorities. I might fill many pages with similar
details. Some of these differences do not disappear till full manhood,
others are gone in a few weeks after birth. And in them all there is so
constant a repetition of lower animal forms that anatomists are
brought to a confidence in the “recapitulation doctrine,” such as they
can hardly give to others by means of a few sample facts.
The most curious of all the monkey traits shown by the new-born
baby is the one investigated by Dr. Louis Robinson (“Nineteenth