Conceptual Theoretical and Empirical Insights

Question: Discuss about the Conceptual Theoretical and Empirical Insights. Answer: Introduction: Strategies are different from objectives, goals and tactics. Strategy has become a buzzword today and people use it frequently in their business conservations to show their business acumen without actually knowing what strategy is. Strategy terms has its origin from the war however as businesses are also no less than war in todays world of increasing globalization and competition where customer has become very demanding and possesses high bargaining power over the organizations (Madsen, Walker, 2015) strategy term has become common in business conservations. A good strategy should be defined in keeping in mind the following 4 questions: Where do we compete, what are our target markets? What is our unique value proposition or why customer should buy from us and not from our competitors? What our strengths and capabilities are? Is it efficient supply chain, reputation, supplier network, dealer network, technology? How we will sustain the unique value going forward? IKEAs strategy is very clear; they compete in a low end furniture market and use mass production to keep the cost low. Their wide network and choice of markets is unique. Not only this, they do not manufacture but design the furniture. They also use flat boxes and do the final assembly at the customer space and this helps them to save on transportation cost. This is how the good strategy is defined. Organization that could be benefitted from the application LOreal is French cosmetic company and leader in beauty products, cosmetic products. LOreals key strengths are its innovation and variety in products, marketing capabilities. Their unique value proposition is their products (Kumar, Bennett, 2003),. However, they relatively have very high inventories of their products and unable to match demand and supply across various parts of the world which result in loss of sales and sometimes obsolete inventory if they manufacture in advance. They need to define clear strategy that should help them to deal with their existing problems. Delayed differentiation is one such thing which can be employed by the organization to get rid of the excessive inventory problem. For instance, they can use labeling postponement strategy which means that they should keep their products ready but do not label the products in a particular language. They should wait for a final order and then can print labels in whatever language they want and thus can supply to an y country. This strategy will differentiates them from their competitors and will be their unique value preposition. This postponement strategy will make them supply chain robust by decreasing the amount of inventory. This strategy helps them to fulfils the demand from different markets worldwide and also quite sustainable. They can bring same strategy to their other product lines and to different manufacturing plants to keep it sustainable. Business Model Innovation Innovation is something that keeps the business running. It either adds more value to the product or brings down the cost and thus provides the competitive advantage. There are big organizations like Xerox, Kodak, Yahoo and many more who were once leaders in the markets but as they failed to innovate themselves and redesign their strategies in respect to market demands, they failed. Kodak missed the bus for digital camera revolution where as Canon, Kodak, Sony innovate themselves and become market leaders in selling the digital camera (Morris, Schindehutte, Richardson, Allen, 2015). Innovation need not necessarily be inventing something. For instance, Amazon does not invent the bookstores but they invent the business model. Uber has one of the most innovative business models where they do own a single taxi themselves, they are just cab aggregators and provides service through their mobile app. Alibaba does not own any inventory despite being a most powerful retailer (Nambisan, Lyytinen, Majchrzak, Song, 2017). Good business model provides answers to following questions: Who is your target customer What are your offering How do you create value How do you generate revenue Organizations could follow 4 step processes for reinventing their business model which are as follows: Initiation defines current way of things and analyzing it Ideation defines new way of doing things by challenging your existing state Integration helps in analyzing the consistency and viability of the business model Implementation refers to start using new model Organization that could be benefitted from the application Dell is the leader is selling PCs online which are configuring to order. It helps its customers to customize their PC by selecting various configurations. Thus, Dells PC s can have hard disk from many vendors depending upon the choice of the consumers as Dell itself is just an assembler. They are able to provide mass customized products by postponement strategy. They assemble the common components that are used across most of the products and then wait for the final assembly till the customer orders is received with exact specifications. There are many other vendors like HP, IBM that do not provide customized products due to their existing business models to consumers and hence missing on a very big target market for techies who like to have their own specifications due to their requirements. Thus, HP does not produce some combinations of Processors, hard disc size, ram size. They have standard PCs with a fixed configuration. There are people in the market who want customized products due to their unique requirements and are willing to pay extra for this. Thus, HP should consider reinventing its business model to capture more market (Blossfeld, Hofacker, 2014). At the same time, Dell also has the opportunity to upgrade its business model by making PCs in standard configurations. It is because many people are not confident of choosing a configuration themselves and hence prefer standard configurations. References Blossfeld, H. P., Hofcker, D. (2014). Globalization, rising uncertainty and life courses in modern societies: a summary of research findings and open research questions.Sociologia del lavoro. Kumar, S., Bennett, K. (2003, January). Global Operations and Logistics Trends in the Household and Personal Care Products Market. InSupply Chain Forum: An International Journal(Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 10-20). Taylor Francis. Madsen, T. L., Walker, G. (2015).Modern competitive strategy. McGraw Hill. Morris, M., Schindehutte, M., Richardson, J., Allen, J. (2015). Is the business model a useful strategic concept? Conceptual, theoretical, and empirical insights.Journal of Small Business Strategy,17(1), 27-50. Nambisan, S., Lyytinen, K., Majchrzak, A., Song, M. (2017). Digital Innovation Management: Reinventing Innovation Management Research in a Digital World.MIS Quarterly,41(1), 223-238.