Management of Tech Study Guide

  MGT 6772 - *COLLABORATIVE* STUDY GUIDE FOR FINAL - Fall 2016 

1. Briefly describe the reasons why Kittyhawk failed to meet the goals set forth at the start of the project.

xReminder: the goals were:

1. Introduce KittyHawk in 12 months (regular product took 18 months)
2. Break-Even Time (BET) of less than 36 months
3. $100 million revenue rate in two years after launch
4. First 1.3-inch drive on the market
5. Revenue Growth rate around 35% so that HP can become a significant industry leader

Reasons for failure:

1. They choose a path too early and had No contingency plan
2. HP’s high end culture, don’t know how to do cheap drives, complex design, complex manufacturing
3. Only risk takers in the dvpt team
4. Too much market uncertainties with the PDA (how to measure a demand for a market that doesn’t exist?), impossible to test the market with a component of a finished good
5. Unrealistic goals

What Nintendo wanted: 1.5million cartridges per day (during christmas) for around $50 each.

Other option: PDAs

Initial strategy: Go for PDA then, when it’s cheaper due to volume, switch to nintendo (at the time, they were only able to produce $130 cartridges instead of $50 ones)

They worked with the sense of urgency; sacrificing performance, features and cost to obtain reliability and to meet the schedule.

Launched in time for a price of $250 each. Trusted heavily the success of PDAs (estimated 500,000 unit sold the next two years) → As priced and estimated, it would have achieved the goals.

In the end, the technology and the design was so that they couldn’t reach the $50 limit. They attracted other customers for other purpose (cash register, camera, …) but the PDAs’ sale didn’t skyrocket as planned.

2. Unique challenges (barriers) may be encountered when implementing new technology in a developing country. Briefly describe 4 challenges faced by ITC and how they were overcome in the e-Choupal Case. 

eChoupal: create an other type of supply chain for farmers in developed countries. The goal was to add transparency according to the prices, by contacting directly the farmer.

Weather forecast (no storage facility, lack of knowledge, pesticides, …) added in villages

Content created by experts, in the farmer's’ language

On the overall, learned from every village experience → incremental strategy to learn from their mistake.

Challenges:

1. Convincing Commision Agents to help with the implementation → “You can make more money with us”. Also,
2. Changing regulations and allowing trades outside the mandis.
3. The eChoupal depended strongly on trust → Trust gained by providing information little by little (incremental strategy:emulate the structure as it was rather than changing it completely + they didn’t get rid of the old way: if you’re not comfortable with the new one you can always go back)
4. Ensure the integrity → they had the Sanchalak (~the elder / more trusted person of the village) take an oath before the entire village. Giving incentives to Sanchalak to promote ITC hubs
5. Fairly distributing its Hub → Distributed so that every village has one not too far
6. Breaking the traditional trade procedure village A ->mandi B -> factory C . Reorganizing the supply chain with new technology
7. Needed to train the farmers on “how to use a computer”

Here is what my group put in their ggdoc, seems pretty accurate also:

1. Poor government regulation

ITC convinced the government to legalize purchases of agricultural commodities outside the mandi (original agricultural marketplace)

      2. Farmers lacked sophisticated inputs and farming practices

Provided weather forecasts, information about fertilizer in local language, and sold and delivered goods to farmers through hubs

      3. Inefficient supply chain for agricultural goods

eChoupal network offered new channels for selling that eliminated cost inflation and middlemen

      4. Farms were fragmented in rural areas

They strategically located the ITC hubs and Samyojaks assisted ITC in setting up in areas

 3. (a) Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of being a technology leader.

(b) What enables a firm to sustain its leadership position?

High R&D investments + overlapping development phases

Short product life-cycle (?) → like Intel with truncated product life cycle

Integrate R&D with marketing
Derivative products
Defining an industry standard
Recognise what is needed
Patents ; maintaining its competitive advantage

Knowledge transfer between R&D, and manufacturing

More services to sustain your competitive advantage

Staying in touch with the market evolution

4. (a) What can be done to improve performance of the R&D Center in the Universal Luxury case ?

Reduce the load of work → Too much utilization increases the cost because of over hours + Ppl leaving → Need lots of training to ensure the qualification with this turnover( Greater focus on quality as compared to quantity)

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