Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Company Strategies and Child Soccer :-)

Wondering why the subject for today's post is so? Well, in the Technology & Business Strategy Class today, and yes, did I write here that this class is going to be a double session every weekday for this week and the next, thus completing the entire course in two weeks time? If not, here it is, I said it :-)
And why did I do that - so that all you readers know that I am going to post a lot about this class in this week and the next. Also, to contrast it with the original Strategy class we had that was a 25 session course, but spanned all across term one and term two :-) This one is a better option, if you ask me :-)

Anyways, continuing on the subject line, today we saw different strategies that various companies have adopted for their competitive advantage and then when it was time to discuss about how it is important to constantly innovate for maintaining our differentiation advantage, if that is our strength, Prof Ramiro showed us a picture of children, aged around 6-8 years playing soccer.

And he mentioned his observation about this game and the picture - at that age, all that the children do is follow the ball, where ever it goes - they just want to be where the action is. Using this as a metaphor, prof. Ramiro then mentioned about how companies also fall into trap of following the leader, thus not only threatening the differentiation advantage of the leader sometimes, but also carrying the extra cost of creating a competitive necessity instead of looking for their own version of competitive advantage. Interesting analogy, I would say :-)

And yes, before this evening session, there was also a class by Conchita, where we took a look at various aspects of project finance, after briefly going through the Inside Job movie elements, that we could not discuss yesterday. In a way, Conchita indirectly hinted us at the dangers of doing things the way everyone else is doing, without thinking about risks associated, just because it looks like yielding more payments in short term, as when these things get too big, they also hit harder. She gave a similar message as Prof Ramiro, but by directly illustrating the recent past in financial sector.

After classes today, I worked with my team-mate for the hands-on rapid innovation accelerator demo day preparation. If I have not already mentioned it here, we have designed an app for medical records maintenance, translation and portability. Its prototype is available in Google Play now and name of the app is 'MedInfo'.

Do go and check it out, when free :-)

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