(This passage was excerpted from material published in 1993.)

    Like many other industries, the travel industry is under increasing pressure to expand globally in order to keep pace with its corporate customers, who have globalized their operations in response to market pressure, competitor actions, and changing supplier relations. But it is difficult for service organizations to globalize. Global expansion through acquisition is usually expensive, and expansion through internal growth is time-consuming and sometimes impossible in markets that are not actively growing. Some service industry companies, in fact, regard these traditional routes to global expansion as inappropriate for service industries because of their special need to preserve local responsiveness through local presence and expertise. One travel agency has eschewed the traditional route altogether. A survivor of the changes that swept the travel industry as a result of the deregulation of the airlines in 1978—changes that included dramatic growth in the corporate demand for travel services, as well as extensive restructuring and consolidation within the travel industry—this agency adopted a unique structure for globalization. Rather than expand by attempting to develop its own offices abroad, which would require the development of local travel management expertise sufficient to capture foreign markets, the company solved its globalization dilemma effectively by forging alliances with the best foreign partners it could find. The resulting cooperative alliance of independent agencies now comprises 32 partners spanning 37 countries.

Line	In the Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico and
	southern Arizona, the flowers of several species of
	columnar cacti—cardon, saguaro, and organ
	pipe—were once exclusively pollinated at night by
(5)	nectar-feeding bats, as their close relatives in arid
	tropical regions of southern Mexico still are. In these
	tropical regions, diurnal (daytime) visitors to columnar
	cactus flowers are ineffective pollinators because,
	by sunrise, the flowers’ stigmas become unreceptive
(10)	or the flowers close. Yet the flowers of the Sonoran
	Desert cacti have evolved to remain open after sunrise,
	allowing pollination by such diurnal visitors as bees and
	birds. Why have these cacti expanded their range of
	pollinators by remaining open and receptive in daylight?
(15)	This development at the northernmost range of
	columnar cacti may be due to a yearly variation in the
	abundance—and hence the reliability—of migratory
	nectar-feeding bats. Pollinators can be unreliable
	for several reasons. They can be dietary generalists
(20)	whose fidelity to a particular species depends on
	the availability of alternative food sources. Or, they
	can be dietary specialists, but their abundance may
	vary widely from year to year, resulting in variable
	pollination of their preferred food species. Finally, they
(25)	may be dietary specialists, but their abundance may
	be chronically low relative to the availability of flowers.
	Recent data reveals that during spring in the
	Sonoran Desert, the nectar-feeding bats are
	specialists feeding on cardon, saguaro, and
(30)	organpipe flowers. However, whereas cactus-flower
	abundance tends to be high during spring, bat
	population densities tend to be low except near
	maternity roosts. Moreover, in spring, diurnal cactus-
	pollinating birds are significantly more abundant in
(35)	this region than are the nocturnal bats. Thus, with bats
	being unreliable cactus-flower pollinators, and daytime
	pollinators more abundant and therefore more reliable,
	selection favors the cactus flowers with traits that
	increase their range of pollinators. While data suggest
(40)	that population densities of nectar-feeding bats are
	also low in tropical areas of southern Mexico, where
	bats are the exclusive pollinators of many species
	of columnar cacti, cactus-flower density and bat
	population density appear to be much more evenly
(45)	balanced there: compared with the Sonoran Desert’s
	cardon and saguaro, columnar cacti in southern Mexico
	produce far fewer flowers per night. Accordingly,
	despite their low population density, bats are able to
	pollinate nearly 100 percent of the available flowers.

The system of patent-granting, which confers temporary monopolies for the exploitation of new technologies, was originally established as an incentive to the pursuit of risky new ideas. Yet studies of the most patent-conscious business of all—the semiconductor industry—suggests that firms do not necessarily become more innovative as they increase their patenting activity. Ziedonis and Hall, for example, found that investment in research and development (a reasonable proxy for innovation) did not substantially increase between 1982 and 1992, the industry's most feverish period of patenting. Instead, semiconductor firms simply squeezed more patents out of existing research and development expenditures. Moreover, Ziedonis and Hall found that as patenting activity at semiconductor firms increased in the 1980s, the consensus among industry employees was that the average quality of their firms' patents declined. Though patent quality is a difficult notion to measure, the number of times a patent is cited in the technical literature is a reasonable yardstick, and citations per semiconductor patent did decline during the 1980s. This decline in quality may be related to changes in the way semiconductor firms managed their patenting process: rather than patenting to win exclusive rights to a valuable new technology, patents were filed more for strategic purposes, to be used as bargaining chips to ward off infringement suits or as a means to block competitors' products.