你的企业能活多久 科学现在给出了答案

It’s a big question, and one that nearly every entrepreneur and economist grapples with: how long do businesses generally survive?

一家企业通常能生存多长时间？这是个很难回答的问题，也是令几乎所有企业家和经济学家感到头疼的问题。

A group of scientists appear to have at least partially unlocked the answer, with a somewhat surprising result: publicly-traded companies die —through acquisitions, mergers, bankruptcy or other reasons — at the same rate irrespective of how well-established they are, or what they actually do.

一个科学家小组似乎已经找到了至少一部分答案。他们发现，上市公司因并购、破产等原因而消亡的速度完全相同，且与其声望和所属行业没有关系。这个结论多少有些出人意料。

The magic number, a new study from scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico reveals, is about 10 years.

美国新墨西哥州圣菲研究所的科学家们经研究发现，这一神奇的数字约为10年。

The study, published in the journal Royal Science Interfaceand conducted by three researchers, was led by then-undergraduate fellow Madeleine Daepp under the guidance of Marcus Hamilton, Professor Luis Bettencourt and Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West.

这项研究成果刊登在月刊《Journal of the Royal Society Interface》上。研究小组由三人组成，以马德琳o德普为首，当时她还是一名本科生研究员。指导该小组的有博士后研究员马库斯o汉密尔顿、路易斯o贝登古尔教授和特聘教授杰弗里o韦斯特。

“We gave her this basic idea, and she did the heavy lifting,” Hamilton, a postdoctoral research fellow at the institute, told Science Daily.

该研究所博士后研究员汉密尔顿接受科学资讯网站Science Daily采访时说：“我们给了德普一些基本数据，最难做的工作都是由她来完成的。”

Hamilton said “there is remarkably little quantitative work” on what economists call company mortality, and existing theory and evidence yield contradictory answers. Some researchers think younger companies are more likely to die than older ones, while others think just the opposite.

汉密尔顿指出，就计算经济学家所说的公司死亡率而言，“现有的量化研究少的可怜”，而且目前的理论和实际证据所得出的结论相互矛盾。有些研究者认为，新公司消亡的可能性大于老公司，另一些人的看法则正好相反。

“We wanted to see if there was any kind of standard behavior or if it was just random,” Hamilton said.

他说：“我们想看看这一现象是否存在某种规律，或者说纯粹是随机事件。”

Daepp, now a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, analyzed Standard and Poor’s Compustat — a database of every publicly traded company since 1950 — using a statistical method called survival analysis. What she and her advisers found is that a company’s mortality rate was not affected by its past performance or even its products.

如今，德普是加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚大学的一名研究生。当时她分析了标准普尔的Compustat数据库，后者囊括了1950年以来所有的上市公司。德普采用的方法叫做生存分析。她和汉密尔顿等指导者发现，公司以往的业绩，甚至产品，对公司死亡率并无影响。

“It doesn’t matter if you’re selling bananas, airplanes, or whatever,” Hamilton said.

汉密尔顿指出：“不管你是卖香蕉的，还是造飞机的，或者从事其他任何行业。”

The reason behind their findings remains beyond their study’s scope, but the researchers hypothesize that the biological world’s systems and competition for resources might provide some sort of insight.

有关该结论背后的原因并不属于他们的研究范围，但这些研究者猜想，生物体系以及资源竞争或许能提供某些答案。