FOUR DIFFERENT SEMINARS

Four Different Seminars Q/A



Four Different Seminars Q/A

Discussion on Seminars

Q.1: Discuss how market-led strategies can help businesses to drive growth and sustain competitive advantage, using examples from US, European and/or Far Eastern businesses.

Answer: For more than a century, business leaders have viewed technology as the primary means to execute and implement their business strategies. However, many of today's most exciting and “disruptive” innovations now tend to occur at the intersection of market insight and technological know-how, making technology an input to the strategy process rather than an after-the-fact enabler. Guided by this insight, many of the companies that are seizing the initiative in this new competitive environment are doing so by taking a fundamentally different approach to strategy development an approach we call technology-driven business strategy.(Gronroos, 1994, 23)

The new premium on market-savvy, technology-driven strategy has several important implications. First, technology matters when it comes to driving growth and, thus, to the formulation of business strategies. This is widely accepted for technology intense businesses such as Cisco, Motorola and IBM, but increasingly is the case for companies dealing in everyday products such as household appliances and vending machines, where new advances in mobile communications and sensor technologies, are radically changing the basis of innovation, consumer value and competition[1]. As a further example, it is reckoned that by 2010 more than 90 percent of the innovation in the automotive industry will be electronics related. Second, when factoring in technology, know-how is often sufficient. Many innovation-based strategies are based on the unique market application of an existing integrated set of technologies rather than requiring technological breakthrough.

Third, innovation emerges where market insight and technological insight intersect, a process that is often easier to harness within the small entrepreneurial firm than in the larger, more established organization. Finally, the competitive advantage afforded by know-how can be fleeting, requiring companies to keep setting the pace within this rapidly changing technology and business context or risk being blown away by it. (Markides, 1999)

At a particular point in time, within any given industry, businesses typically compete on a specific subset of performance dimensions such as product features, price, customer service or breadth of offerings. Companies most often invest energy in beating the competition along these “accepted” performance dimensions. Innovative companies, on the other hand, play to a different set of strengths. Instead of competing head-to-head with industry rivals on historical performance measures, they differentiate themselves through a new dimension that exploits an emerging or unarticulated market need. For instance, an industrial products company might shift the basis of competition from product features to rapid fulfillment, or a services company could change the focus from price to convenience. This type of innovation delivers new value to consumers, while creating competitive differentiation for the innovative company.

The concept and principles of a business strategy process combining market insight with technology know how can help companies across a wide variety of sectors to improve their innovation record. It starts with the recognition that innovation is now critical to sustained growth, ...