Wharton Chapter 9 - Strategy Making in Uncertain Environments

In chapter 9, the author discussed the rapidly changing strategies needed to survive in the market today. New strategies and the continual adjustment of existing strategies must be tested and tried to impact the overall results. The author discussed discipline and imagination as the underlying pillars of strategies.

Discipline - using a consisten application of rules to evaluate a set of alternatives. using systemic ways to evaluate competitive environments.

Limitations: sticking to methods that have always worked rarely create new original insights. Discipline focuses too much on analysis and thinking that because a method was done one way in the past, it will generate similar results in the future (not taking into account variables such as market, technological, and consumer changes). Alternatives are rarely generated and there is too much power placed on analysis.

Imagination - finding "deliberate diversities" in the way problems are defined and using these diversities to develop solutions. Focus less on experience and more on new and innovative ideas and ways to envision the future.

Limitations: simply put- chaos ensues because of lack of structure. Imagation may focus too much on the future and not the current issues at hand. Imagation may overlook valuable experience and undervalue where the technology/company has come from. Imagination can slow the process because it is chaotic and unstructured and can involve many decision makers.

The framework of utilizing experience with imagination is seen in many companies today. Apple again is a very creative company that has expanded it's product line through creativity and understanding their history/core competencies. With many of apple's products, they exercise discipline within their product lines but have also evaluated other alternatives to create superior products in the market. Apple uses both the framework and the limitations to create new, innovative products for constantly changing markets in uncertain environments.

Wharton Chapters 8 - Commercializing Emerging Technologies.

In chapter 8, the author describes capitalizing on new technologies in the marketplace by watching their success and failures and determine how to improve the product in the market or couple complementary technologies (either products or services) with the new technology to succeed. There were three challenges of commercialization discussed in the chapter:

• Change in Complementary Assets - As the market changes with new products and services, the existing complementary assets can become obsolete (ie. training and sales staff on eletromechanical calculators example).
• Change in Customers - Customer needs evolve with technology and with new products and technologies, the set of customers also change (i.e. typesetting in offices replaced by word processors for all users -new market segments)
• Change in Competition - Competitors change as technology in the market place changes and new market niches emerge -new competition arises as well

The author stated three hurdles emerging technology must overcome:

• whether to invest in developing new technology
• using the investment to develop or acquire new technological capabilities
• commercializing the technology.

A great example of commercializing the technology is the shift from analog watches to digital watches. The analog watch was carefully crafted by the swiss until the introduction of liquid crystal displays and LED's for digital displays. The skilled staff to create the watches was no longer necessary as the manfacturing process to mass produce was farmed out all over the world and digital display watches began to outsell analogs because of cost. Many of the larger companies (Seiko, Casio) began watching the other manufactures and merged companies and products. The mass commercialization of watches could hit new markets because the watch become both affordable and available to all types of consumers. Information taken from "Swatch and the Global Industry" - http://eres.boisestate.edu.libproxy.boisestate.edu/eres/docs/10483/swatch_and_the_global_watch_industry.pdf