For many organizations and countries alike, innovation and innovation management are no longer luxury items, but rather necessities and a means of sustaining economic development and competitiveness. To serve customer well and maintain the competitive position in business, companies are forced to focus on the creation, updating, availability, quality & use of innovation by all employees and teams at work and in the market place. Innovation can be defined as the implementation of new created ideas for generating business value. Many times, people use the term ‘innovation’ for ‘innovation creation’. But there is a difference between the two. While innovation creation is an important aspect of innovation processes, so is the ability to search for and identify relevant external innovation, applying existing innovation to new contexts, understand and absorb unfamiliar external innovation to blend and integrate different bodies of innovation together. Thus innovation processes are much more than innovation creation Continue reading
Modern Management Concepts
Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
History of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) Concept In 1990, Michael Hammer, a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published an article in the Harvard Business Review, in which he claimed that the major challenge for managers is to obliterate non-value adding work, rather than using technology for automating it. This statement implicitly accused managers of having focused on the wrong issues, namely that technology in general, and more specifically information technology, has been used primarily for automating existing work rather than using it as an enabler for making non-value adding work obsolete. Hammer’s claim was simple: Most of the work being done does not add any value for customers, and this work should be removed, not accelerated through automation. Instead, companies should reconsider their processes in order to maximize customer value, while minimizing the consumption of resources required for delivering their product or service. Continue reading
Business Analytics – Meaning, Use and Scope
Business Analytics deals with the methodologies employed by organizations to enhance their business by making optimized decisions with the use of statistical techniques that might involve data collection and analysis. Business analytics might require many complex techniques that need advanced statistics. Applying Business Analytics, it may be possible to find how a territory or a region reacts to certain product variations or added features. This information can be very useful in devising new product line with features that are likely to maximize sales in a particular region for a set of target audiences. A proper analysis of data might also tell about things like recurring customer support issues and thereby proactive steps can be taken before it grows out of proportion. Business Analytics is often used by marketing folks in predicting and analyzing consumer behavior. This is done by applying statistical analytical techniques on historical data of customer transactions. Without Continue reading
What Is Coworking?
One of the grimmest predictions about the future was described by Robert Putnam in his work on social capital. He envisaged low likelihood of participation in community life, smaller groups of friends, even less happiness, and lower perceived quality of life. Furthermore, the enthusiasts of globalization and internet predicted that since people do not have to be together in order to work together, so simply they will not be. Both of these statements are deemed fallacious when recent innovative developments like coworking spaces are considered. Instead of dividing people and further rupturing community life, they reintroduce collaboration and community building through establishing an innovative office design that is being implemented worldwide. Coworking has been present for centuries, but the first forms of collaboration appeared in the beginning of the 20th century. Artists from around the world gathered in Paris to live and work. One of the establishments, La Ruche, was Continue reading
Mind Mapping – A Tool For Visually Organize Your Thoughts
Mind mapping is a very old technique which has been used for centuries for brainstorming, visual thinking and problem solving in all subject areas. Some of the earliest examples date back to the 3rd century where these techniques have been used by the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle. A mind map is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain. It harnesses the full range of cortical skills – word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness – in a single, uniquely powerful manner. In so doing, it gives you the freedom to roam the infinite expanses of your brain. Mind mapping was further developed by Tony Buzan following his research into note-taking techniques in the late 1960s. Mind maps are a type of diagram used to visually display information in a relational way. Typically they start with a central idea, denoted Continue reading
New Trends In E-Business
E-business changed the way business was being done over the years. It created more and more avenues and opportunities. E-business changed the competitive platform. While the old competitive barriers are diminishing it created new entry and competitive barriers. The hard competitive barriers are becoming weak while the soft competitive barriers became more and more prominent. It is believed that not even 50% of the potential of e-business is to be unleashed yet. This definitely indicates that e-business has lot more to offer. E-business has appealed the businesses and customers from all segments. E-business increased the connectivity among different businesses. The integration among departments, different businesses, and different sectors through e-business made it possible to offer variety of services to customers. The new technologies, high speed internet made the transactions possible. Improved integration and interoperability needs of next generation e-business systems are met by new e-business solution architectures. New technologies of Continue reading