Starbucks

Abstract

Starbucks has always been a global company, really a global presence with a global sense of itself. Opened in Seattle in 1971, Starbucks seemed, and felt, at first more local than global. In its early years, it sold whole‐bean, freshly roasted coffee out of one store with the owners often standing behind the counter in aprons. Even when the company opened a second, and then a third store, it still seemed like a small mom and pop kind of place. But as much as Starbucks looked and acted local, it was already enmeshed in the global. All the beans it sold came from some place else, places like Sumatra or Ethiopia or Guatemala located on the economic fringes of the developed world. Indeed it was this physical, cultural, and economic distance that enhanced what Starbucks sold – the reworking of an ordinary everyday commodity – coffee – into a slightly exotic, affordable luxury from a far‐off place – a grande latte.

A multi-level model of emerging technology: An empirical study of the evolution of biotechnology from 1976 to 2003

“…Especially the field of evolutionary economics has contributed much to our understanding of the process of technological change. According to evolutionary economics, due to an agent’s limits in information-processing and problem-solving capacity, or bounded rationality [ 19 ], there is a need to search and recombine locally from a limited set of components [ 20 ]. After all, if the number of components that an agent considers increases linearly, the number of potential (re-)combinations that can be made with these components and the associated cognitive load grow exponentially [ 21 ].…”

“…After all, if the number of components that an agent considers increases linearly, the number of potential (re-)combinations that can be made with these components and the associated cognitive load grow exponentially [ 21 ]. Therefore, agents rely on heuristics to reduce their cognitive load, rather than applying strict and rigid rules of optimization [ 19 ].…”