MBA 816 Disruptive Tech & Innovation Review

MBA 816 Disruptive Tech & Innovation - Final Exam Review

• Innovation as Strategy: Business organizations aim to create value. Linking innovation efforts to the overall strategy is crucial. Disruptive innovations should be predicted, prepared for, and pursued to build on or threaten existing business models.

• Adaptive Open Systems: Businesses adapt their behaviors in response to feedback. They are open systems requiring environmental resources, using those resources to create new things, and sending new creations back to the environment.

• Aggregate Project Plan and Portfolio: This approach creates discipline in project selection and creation. It defines the scope of each project and focuses attention on long-term technical and organizational capabilities.

• Project Types: This categorization (Breakthrough, Platform & Adjacent, Enhancement and Derivative) enables strategic thinking about project opportunities.

• Value Creation: Organizations create value through inputs (economic, natural, intellectual, human, and social capital), transformation processes, and resulting outputs (products and services). Business performance & reliability are key outputs, and impact on stakeholders is the ultimate goal.

• Types of Input:

  • Economic Capital: tangible financial resources.
  • Natural Capital: resources from the natural environment.
  • Intellectual Capital: intangible assets including reputation, stakeholder relationships, brand names, knowledge, innovative capacity, and dynamic capabilities.
  • Human Capital: knowledge and abilities of individuals.
  • Social Capital: intangible resources from relationships among individuals.

• Protecting or Sharing Intellectual Capital: Firms must decide whether and how to protect their intellectual capital. Protecting innovation helps firms retain control. However, sometimes not protecting a technology can encourage wider adoption and increase its likelihood of becoming a dominant design.

• Patents: These grant rights to exclude others from producing, using, or selling an invention. Patents must be useful, novel, and non-obvious. Different types of patents exist for processes, machines, manufactured items, designs, and plant varieties. Patent trolling is obtaining patents for licensing or litigation rather than production.

• Trademarks: Marks (words, phrases, symbols) distinguish products. Trademarks are established with legitimate use, but are better protected if registered. Registration is essential for international trademark protection.

• Collaborative Arrangements: Forms include joint ventures (e.g., Hulu), licensing agreements (e.g., music licensing), outsourcing, and collective research organizations.

• Choosing and Monitoring Partners: Organizations should consider resource and strategic fits when choosing partners. Collaborations can influence factors like customer power and rivalry. Internal strengths and weaknesses also influence potential benefits of collaborations, as do strategic directions.

• Design Thinking: This design approach reframes problems and solutions through a human-centered perspective. Central questions focus on interconnectedness and potential system-wide impacts of changes.

• Innovation Concepts:

  • System: set of interconnected entities working together for an outcome.
  • Model: representation of a system with connections.
  • Design Thinking Process: Steps in human-centered design include Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, and Implement.

• Iterative Non-Linear Process Design thinking proceeds through stages but is not strictly linear. Iterations and feedback loops are necessary as new knowledge is gained.

• Customer Journey Maps: Useful in understanding user experiences. Value delivered by a product/service can be functional, emotional, or impact on performance and experiences for the better.

• Technology Substitution: Two scenarios show various levels of challenges and opportunities for new technologies. Scenario 1 is low challenges and low opportunities for improvement. Scenario 2 has high challenges and high opportunities for existing technologies.

• Sustainable Speed: Rapid customer feedback, experimentation, and balance between speed of innovation and offering value to customers are crucial.

• Tuckman's Team Development Model: Teams progress through Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing stages. Changes to members can cause regression.

• GRPI Team Effectiveness Model: The model highlights different aspects of team cooperation: Goals, Roles, Processes, and Interpersonal relationships.

• Change Agent: Enablers of change within or outside an organization. Change agents promote new ways of doing things, drive process/organizational transformations, and motivate others through the transformation. Change Agents can be an executive, a lower-tier employee, or someone external like a consultant, coach, or psychologist.

• Change Agent Responsibilities: include promoting the need/value for change, formulating how change will be executed, supporting and guiding the transformation process, ensuring the transformation benefits the organization, advocating for the change efforts, and mediating between stakeholders.

• Agile Operating Models: A blueprint for a new operating model. The model incorporates value, structure, agile teams, the backbone, and roadmaps.

• Agile Operating Models- Incentives and Culture: How to motivate teams when they don't own profit and loss, adapt culture to support agile transformations, encourage collaboration, and empower employees are key to establishing trust and achieving transformation goals.

• Role of the Leader: Core and enabling teams work together to create value, coordinating priorities, objectives, key results, and empowering teams.

• Central Role of Knowledge in the Digital Age: Human capital encompasses employee abilities. Social capital means relationships of talented members. Knowledge management (explicit and tacit) is crucial for success.

• Knowledge for Competitive Advantage: Knowledge can be tacit or explicit. Attracting and utilizing human capital is essential for competitive advantage.

• Social Capital: Potential Downside: Groupthink can hinder creativity. Social ties can improve interactions and support but can be misused. Social networks must be well-understood to maximize value and effectiveness.

• Creating Value with Technology: Sharing knowledge & information within the organization leverages human and knowledge capital, conserving resources, developing products, and creating opportunities.

• Technology Trends: Includes emerging technologies and their applications, such as facial recognition, biotechnology, crowd learning, Human Machine Interface, Drone Technology, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, voice recognition, cloud computing, and nanotechnology.

Prepare for your MBA 816 final exam with this comprehensive review of Disruptive Technology and Innovation. This quiz covers key concepts such as innovation strategies, adaptive systems, project planning, and value creation within organizations. Enhance your understanding and readiness for the exam with these essential topics.