Comments (0) 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
Updates to websites
1. I posted slides from the yesterday under Readings and Discussion/Module – Communication.
2. I added the Industry Creation Report under assignments. The grading rubric that we will use is listed there, along with the pairings. The industry creation signup tab was taken off the webpage.
Next class:
No reading for next class. We will have a quiz on the the first two modules. The final two groups will present their business concepts. We will begin discussion of the Module on Technology and Markets, and have a tinkertoy activity to illustrate this.
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/
You need to select the industry on which you will write your industry creation report today by midnight. These reports are scheduled to be due on March 2nd, which is coming up fast. As I wrote in my e-mail, when you select your industry, write down a sentence explaining how this industry is defined.
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 untill 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
This article from the economist discusses whether business processes should be patentable. It has a good discussion of the purposes for patents and whether they actually serve those intended purposes.
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15479680
I have posted the projects that have been presented in class on the page “Project Team Selection”. Please log on to the site and post your top three preferences in a comment. You will need to be proactive about searching to find a group. We are not going to assign groups. Once you have a group formed (no more than 4 students), please tell us and we will record this.
I have also posted the reading for Thursday. This reading is particularly important for those who plan to work in a tech startup that is based on technology connected with universities.
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.
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:
Panorama theme by Themocracy
