SO-11 How can managers develop strategies when their environment is continuously changing?

Oh yes,

I forgot to sign off my last post. So I will do it now so it will look nice on our SO-11 blog :).

To all fellow quest knights, with respect to the bloggers of the SO-11 blog , I say to you:

Bye for now and may good fortune guide our paths, may it be in the present, the near future, or the rest of our lives.

All the best,

Irwan

The journey has almost reached its destination. I thought, amongst all the posts regarding essay structure and writing style, I would write about consensus in this week’s last blog post (and probably the last during this Quest).

– Consensus
The early results from my empirical investigation encompassing a Delphi technique survey consisting of two rounds show me that there is a significant positive correlation between how people with a background in business and economics perceive a certain corporate firm’s degree of innovativeness and their prediction on the length of the firm’s corporate survival in at least one of the mentioned key indices. This however does not imply that there is a causal relationship between being innovative as a firm and surviving longer as a firm than less innovative firms. Considering that innovation is often related to substantial risks which can lead to failure and even the downfall of entire organizations you might think that huge commercial conglomerates are risk-averse regarding innovation, especially discontinuous innovation. Strong links between products and business processes that were created in the past makes it that firms have to make a complex decision, to hold on to current activities or fully jump on the bandwagon of the discontinuous innovation (Utterback, 1994). Tidd et al. (2005) speak of “the riding two horses dilemma” – think about Ben Hur and betting here ;) – or as Christensen (1997) calls it “the innovator’s dilemma”. But! When others innovate and you as a corporate firm do nothing you have to be careful not to stay behind till its too late to catch up. When the so called “sailing ship effect” occurs industry wide and the old routines of doing business struggle to stay alive you have to be ready to make the right bet. And as I see it, a master of the innovation management process is more ready than the apprentice who still needs to learn all the ropes.

– How to facilitate the innovation management process
Thus the question arises how to facilitate this innovation management process to become a firm that rides the wave of change and continuously survive (long-term) by staying innovative. This is a subject I want to elaborate some more about in my final essay. Regarding this I think some of the challenges and compulsory articles will be of great use to me and of course the reader. For examples one can use different tools such as implementing scenario planning (Van der Heijden, 2005), taking the organizational design into account to be flexible and adaptive to innovation (Goold and Campbell, 2002), stimulating entrepreneurship (Burgelman, 1983), incorporating a Business Intelligence Unit, striving for consensus by using the Delphi technique, using other forecasting methods like extrapolation and modeling, and having a balanced innovation portfolio aimed at incremental innovation as well as radical innovation.

References:
Christensen, C. M. 1997, The Innovator’s Dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.
Burgelman, Robert A., “Corporate Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management: Insights from a Process Study”
Management Science, Vol. 29, No. 12. (Dec., 1983), pp. 1349-1364.
Goold, M. and Campbell A., 2002, Designing Effective Organizations: How to Create Structured Networks Jossey-Bass, San Fransisco, CA.
Tidd, J., Bessant, J., & Pavitt, K. 2005, “Key issues in innovation management,” in Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organizational Change, 3 edn, Wiley, Chichester.
Utterback, J. M. 1994, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.
Van der Heijden, 2005, Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation John Wiley & Sons Ltd., West Sussex

Hello everybody,

This will be my last post on this blogsite. I will continue to look and try to answer questions if they come by. So please let me now if something is on your mind. This blogsite was pretty usefull I think. I have read a lot of posts and comments which helped me solving my (our) question. I also hope I have provided some information which was usefull to you as well.

I want to thank all of you guys and mr. Wolters for coordinating this course.

Good luck everybody with your paper and I hope we all will receive a nice grade at the end!

René.

Ps. I have saved my posts because I didn’t have internet, thatswhy I now post two at the same time.

Hi,

This was our last collegeweek and I was wondering how everybody feels about the last confrontation lecture. I didn’t hear from mr. Rietdijk about the final extra points which could be earned. Therefore I was curious if somebody knew anything about that, because I believe we were very serious and active during that session.

Furthermore I think we received some usefull information about finishing our paper. Especially how we should use footnotes and numbers instead of direct author references, and how to incorporate the other challenges whithin our paper. How to write in layman style is also clear now I think.

Does somebody has questions right now?

Greets.

HI all,

I also made this post as a comment, i heard that some people heard.. :) that you have to use other quest-ions as well in your paper.
I don’t think this is necessary, but dependend on the arguments you use in your paper… The quest-ion about innovation for example could be a very usefull quest-ion….

On the challenges part… you can use the connotations you got from your lay people to get a better understanding of lay man thinking and incorporate this in your paper…

For the second challenge, i used the article we had to summarise in my paper, because there is a lot of usefull information in it…

I still have a LOT of writing to do…it’s going to be a busy week, but everybody good luck with the essay and also with the strategy course :)

Ciao

Hi everyone, i didn’t even realise that this was the last week that we have to post comments and process of our paper until i read some peoples’ posts. From the summary Adeline made about the last confrontation lecture that was held a couple of days ago, i can say that most of it makes sense. Personally, i’m glad that i already have some of the points integrated in my paper. I tried to write my paper in a way that anyone who reads it may understand what i’m trying to say. When making referencing i sometimes even try to put it in my own words afterwards, just to make it a little bit clearer. I think some of the challenges we got during this course were of a great help in order to continue the process of my paper. It helped me to work on my paper on a regular basis instead of leaving all the work for the last two weeks, and some comments on the blogs helped me think as well of ways i could write a better paper with a better overview. I hope everyone is well on their way in writing their papers. Good luck to you all!

Hi everyone,

Christopher i totally agree with you on the post from the student who gives comments on other peoples video’s. Especially on the part that this student is dissapointed in them…. and says that a lot of students maybe chose the wrong study…. very very disrespectfull in my eyes..

I think one can incorporate other question’s into this question as well. I find this very creative… E.g. look at the Innovate quest-ion… could be usefull for our quest..

Adeline, thanks for the summary!

Reg’s,

Lowie

Hi everyone,

With this post I want to tell and ask you something, regarding the quest and videos.

Since I read a couple of the posts and comments on other blogs, I’m a bit confused about some aspects. Some students write something about that we have to include information from other quests in our paper. I have never heard something about that, neither in our last confrontation lecture. What do you think about that…tell me? (see blog SO07)

I also saw one comment, in which a student reacts on all the videos he has seen. He says, that almost all the videos are not following the meaning of the challenge, because a lot of them don’t show a dynamic situation. I’m not sharing his opinion, because in most cases it’s very difficult to show the real dynamics and it seems ‘”static” very quickly. Also because we were not allowed to include acting, we had to show the dynamics with some shots or video. So, it consists in most cases of several quick shots and with these it’s very difficult to show the whole process.

Well, Adeline gave a very complete summary of the important aspects, which are discussed in our last confrontation lecture. There is nothing to add, besides the comments in that post from yesterday).

See ya all, good luck, bye,

Christopher

- The challenge
The challenge was to make a short film of a business’ ‘real-life’ practices. The produced film should be clear on showing a dynamic reality stipulating the ordinariness and the ad hoc (improvising) nature of it.

- My overall experience
After a lengthy learning, editing and conversion process I managed to make a short film. Now I would like to share my experiences as a layman filmmaker. It was my first shot at making a film; I used my rather old but still functioning Canon Digital IXUS 400 photo camera to record short video clips. Overall the whole project was quite fun to undertake, maybe I found it a bit too much fun considering the amount of time I have spend working on it.

- Difficulties and lessons learned
There were some difficulties I stumbled upon. First I would like to state that I did not underestimate the length of the editing process, however I must say that I just had no time to begin early with it considering other coursework and travelling back and fort. Second thing, where I think a lot of people whether amateur or pro struggle with, is choosing which material to use and which to disregard. Thus the filming and information gathering is just a small phase in an entire chain of process activities that in respect to the initial phase take up a lot of more time. Especially the editing and conversion activities contributed a large chunk to the total amount of time spend; at least this was the case for me.

- Straight to the point… where can I download your film?!
But enough already with all this jabbering and go straight to the point. The film can be downloaded through the links below. There is a 5m40s version (including closing credits) which has English subtitles, and an extended version which lasts 12m39s. The extended version is meant for people who are, besides the dynamic reality aspect, also interested in more in-depth explanations and more insight into the running of a fire department. I was asked not to put this on any of the online streaming video sites yet, so I provide two megaupload links to download the film. It will be online till the end of this course and maybe after I have presented the film to the fireman who volunteered to take part in my film it will be made available again.

Bye for now and have fun watching other people’s videos. Now I have some time I sure will surf around watching videos.

URL 5m40s Version:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=R4CEUBXP

URL Extended Version:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7EKWX4YS

This confrontation lecture was in my opinion very useful for the structure of our final paper. I gained an insight in the expectation of our professor and how we have to structure our paper. Well for those who were absent I am going to summarize the most important outcomes.

1 How to write in layman’s language, could you point us in the right direction regarding writing style e.g. usage of analogies, simplifications, exaggeration, conciseness vs detail?
- make examples throughout the paper in order to make the understanding easier for laypersons
- in order to make it easier to read avoid in-text references. Make (1)footnotes on the end of the page about the name of the author and make at the end of the paper a (2) list of all the references made in the paper in alphabetical order of the authors
- be careful with using analogies because they can be distractive
- make a clear structure throughout the paper with a guideline and at the end of every chapter make a bridge to the next (eg sum up the precedent information and make a link to the next chapter)
- state clearly the problem and the sub-questions (introduction)
- for laypersons question statements are easier to understand than hypothesis
- define terms
- in the theoretical part use most influential theories

2 How to use the empirical data specifically?
- explain the purpose if the empirical research, outcomes and then compare to theory
- you can change the initial statement in the course of your research because the results of your research can invalidate statements
- outline the limitations of your empirical research
- write down the conclusion of your empirical research and how you would have proceeded, if you had more time

3 When to focus, when not to, and when decide to stop focusing?
- some of us chose to focus on one special point for their research (eg innovation, BI) and other stayed more general. you have to justify why you took that decision
- conclusion should not focus only on one aspect

4 How to integrate our results from the challenges and confrontations?
- refer to challenges in your paper
- Challenge 1-3 can be incorporated easily

Well that are all the notes I took. The third and fourth questions do not have so many points. Maybe other persons can look it through and add or correct some of the points. Concerning the grading of the paper, the professor will take creativity, scientific research and contribution (connection between theory and research) into account.

All the best,
Adeline