We will discuss the role of technology in business. We will look at what constitutes a dominant design and when does it emerge. We will also see how technologies are systems and whether there are better ways of designing products and organizations to take advantage of the systems view of technology. There are no readings for Tuesday. For Thursday2/25, we will discuss the case on the video game industry. I would like you to think about the following questions as you read the case. We will have a discussion in class on Thursday be prepared:
Q1: Which strategies mentioned in the article influence Technology push, which ones affect customer adoption? Why?
Q2: Does this hold for industries with network effects (demand side scale economies)? Why and Why not?
Q3: What does the case imply for the ongoing standards war between HD DVD and Blu Ray? Who do you think will win and why?
Q4: Are there any tradeoffs when making products backward compatible?
Required Case Reading: Technology Leapfrogging by Melissa Schilling
Slides: Upcoming
Supplementary Materials: IBIS World Report on Video game Consoles (you know where to get it)
Innovators Dilemma (Be backward compatible or move ahead)
Although most early entrants did not fare well, I enjoyed the exercise and hope you did too. A number of concepts were illustrated in class and we will cover many of these in our next two classes. First movers do not necessarily win. Surprisingly, the team with fewest members won….We will go into more depth about some of these concepts but doing it practically in class is a lot of fun. Here are some pictures. I apologize for the low technology black and white pics….
Testing stability
Reaching new heights...
A good idea..for the short term?
For those interested in green technologies, government incentives and opportunities in this area. Watch the webcast at the www.kauffman.org
“Spurring Business Startups and Innovation in Clean Technology”
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. EST
To view webcast go to: www.kauffman.org/NGA
Speaking of futurists and future technology trajectories, here is what a few futurists are thinking about in terms of what our world will look like in 20-50 years.
http://mashable.com/2009/08/20/ted-future/
When we talked about shifts in class, we usually think of changes in regulation like what happened in 2000 with the switching off of degraded signal feature in GPS systems. This allowed GPS signals to be accurate to less than 12 mts potentially spawning a number of location based services industries (hint for the assignment ?) from (PND: Portable navigation devices used in cars or handheld) to location based gaming systems. But there can be other ones and some of them might have a slow buildup until there is a tipping point. If you have seen AVATAR, you will be able to visualize the possibilities this is going to throw up. So say we believed that this was truly a shift in what we do, can we think of opportunities arising from this…..
Check out this link on Cnet. http://ces.cnet.com/8301-19167_1-10142957-100.html
Hi, with today’s class we complete our first module on value creation and industry analysis. This is an important module as it covers the conceptual overview of value creation and strategy. Industry analysis is an important constituent of most business plans and we have covered it in sufficient depth along with providing research tools to address this question in case industry is not clearly defined. We would like to cover these topics in greater depth but given the constraints in terms of covering other areas, we have to shrink this down to 4 classes. We have tried to give you concise details that will help you as you start thinking about your ventures, however if you have any questions about this feel free to send an email, post a comment on the blog or stop by during office hours.
If you are interested in reading about how and why powerful incumbent firms fail to define their industry, the article on Marketing Myopia by Levitt is a good one. First published in 1960, it still holds relevance today and here is one written almost 15 years later as a review. But you can see its relevance even today–VOIP changing cable companies to being Content/Internet providers, PC Games changing the landscape leading to and Interactive Entertainment industry instead of Video game, movie, plays etc, and medical devices and drugs converging to form the Life sciences industry instead of the pharmaceutical, device, biologic industries.
http://www.casadogalo.com/marketingmyopia.pdf
This class we will look at Industry Analysis and go through a checklist for doing Industry Analysis in the Automobile Industry. We will look at how we should define our Industry, whose perspective should we take and how should we analyze the Five Forces in this Industry. Since this is a fairly well known Industry, it is easy to identify suppliers, buyers, rivals and possible new entrants, however I have included a summary of the 2010 Industry report which will serve to highlight a few points. However for many industries we do not have a clear idea for what the Industry structure is or who are the buyers or suppliers. We will have the Business Reference Librarion come and give a presentation on research tools we have to give us this information. This will be useful in the Industry Creation report assignment
Readings:
US Auto Industry Outlook
Owen’s idea in class was cool and remined me of a product I had seen before. The concept is similar, you dont want to beat the purpose of an alarm clock by hitting the snooze button (by the way there is no escaping the snooze button as you have to have something to shut off the alarm). Here is a cool idea developed as a class project at MIT by a grad student. Its already worth half a million doallars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLS20pWMs6Q
This week we will start our first module on Industry/Strategy. The first class will focus on giving a conceptual understanding of value creation. For part of the class, we will discuss an academic article that presents a well-reasoned view of how value is created in a simple economy. We will go through some fun short exercises that illustrate when value is created, how much and who appropriates value. Please skim through the article and if you find some sections difficult or confusing, skip them.
Readings:
Brandenburger & Stuart Article
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