Life and Business Improvement

The product life cycle (PLC) is tied closely to the concept of Diffusion of Innovation, which explains how information and acceptance of new products spread through a market. Innovation is anything new that solves needs by offering a significant advantage over existing methods customers use. Innovation can encompass both highly advanced technology products, such as new computer chips, and non-technological products, such as a new soft drink. For marketers, a key concept to emerge from research on new product diffusion is the identification of adopter categories into which members of a market are likely to fall. These categories include: Innovators – Represent a small percentage of the market that is at the forefront of adopting new products. These people are often viewed as enthusiasts and are eager to try new things, often without regard to price. While a good test ground for new products, marketers find that Innovators often do not remain loyal as they continually seek new prod...

There is an adage that ‘he who fails to plan, plan to fail’. This statement is as true as tomorrow, because whether you like it or not, tomorrow must surely come – unless you are dead! Planning is the integral part of our daily activities. If you don’t plan your day before going out, no wonder you failed everyday! For marketers planning is an essential task that must be continually undertaken. As we will see, shifting market conditions, including changing customer needs, advance in technology and competitive threats, almost always insure that what worked in the past will not work in the future, thus requiring a new strategy on how a product is marketed. Marketing planning is also important since it is often a prerequisite for obtaining funding whether one is a marketer in a large corporation seeking additional money for his or her department or is part of a small start-up company looking for initial funding. The 21 st century business environment is driven by advances in techn...

Consistent with a Red Queen effect, firms whose patents cited competitors' older ones have slower rates of new product introduction. Thus, the speed of learning matters: organizations that learn slowly from competitors may find their innovation performance rapidly deteriorating. Firms citing older extra-industry patents introduce new products at a higher rate, however. Intra-firm knowledge has a nonlinear effect, first promoting, then hampering innovation as age increases. Temporal diversity in intra-firm and extra-industry knowledge reduces the number of new product introductions but may still positively impact their innovativeness. By considering the location of knowledge in both time and space (that is, its relatedness to a firm's existing knowledge base), newer knowledge is always better for innovation an issue that is made all the more relevant as digitization hastens technology and industry dynamics. Different organizational processes require different paces, and the ...

Problems faced by Managers Today The coming of the 21 st century held meaning for most Western societies, serving as an opportunity for broader speculation about what ought to be done to improve the performance of businesses. In the field of management, cycles of boom and bust in Asia had called into question new ways of organizing hailed in the 1980s, and questions and concerns mounted about inadequacies of 20th century views of business firms. The 21 st century comes with dramatic changes and the idea that, to cope with it, managers ought to strategize anew and shape and reshape their firms. To understand what vital developments are actually taking place in the 21st century, managers need to ask the questions; which current conceptions successfully capture these opportunities and threats, and the vital trends in strategizing, organizing, and managing? Or can current conceptions be extended to serve this purpose? Over the past two decades, the world has moved from the Cold War...