Wednesday February 29, 2017 - Class #11 Porter's 5 forces vs SWOT analysis

Today:

In Class #8 we discussed Porter's Five forces and how its used to analyze a company and industry. In Class #10 (Last Class), we discussed using SWOT analysis to analyze a company and industry.

How are these tools related? What are their differences and similarities?

SWOT and Michael Porter's Five Forces analysis model are both useful tools in strategic planning. While they both help in assessing your company's strengths and weaknesses relative to industry opportunities and challenges, a primary difference is that SWOT focuses more on company-specific elements while Five Forces involves a look at five important competitive factors when making a strategic decision.

SWOT Basics
SWOT is a basic assessment of your company's current position based on strengths and weaknesses, as well as a look at opportunities and potential threats as the company moves forward. To conduct this analysis, company leaders often set up a table that includes key points in each of the four SWOT categories. Strengths and weaknesses are analyzed relative to how your company currently measures up against competitors. Identifying opportunities and threats involves brainstorming future events or direction.

Five Forces Basics
The Five Forces model includes five factors in a competitive assessment. They include supplier power, buyer power, competitive rivalry, substitution threat and threat of new entry. You use Five Forces analysis to figure out the competitive advantages your business has in each area. As a product reseller, for instance, it helps to know your relative bargaining power with industry suppliers and buyers. The general level of competition may also affect your opportunities. Substitution threats and potential new entries involve analyzing long-term viability if you enter a market.

Level of Specificity
One major distinction between the two is that
      1) SWOT is a general, overall assessment, while
          Five Forces is typically focused on a single growth decision (one product).

You might start with SWOT to paint the picture of your company's current position in the marketplace and then look ahead to future strategic options.

Then, Five Forces provides a tool to assess viability of particular product, service or industry expansion. You can weigh diversification into a product category using Five Forces, for instance.

Competition and Time-Orientation
       1) SWOT is about your business and its position, and
            Five Forces is a tool you use to analyze competitors and how they could inhibit you.

Generally, the best opportunities for a business lie in situations where a company's strengths relative to competition align with its opportunities and less inhibiting competitive factors. Time-orientation is also slightly different with SWOT and Five Forces. With SWOT, you assess your current position and future endeavors. Five Forces is centered mostly on future decisions.

Drone

BY: Shadae Perry

Drones are slowly becoming the new phase of technology for the future. Drones started out as a military technology, but are increasingly being used for a wide range of consumer and commercial applications. Drones are going to be used in the upcoming years for various reasons such as, inspecting critical infrastructure like bridges and power lines, to survey areas struck by natural disasters, and many other creative uses. Drones being used specifically to help the environment will eventually lead to certain job titles fading away due to the new technology of drones. These drones will be able to catch certain things that men can't or will simply take twice as long to figure out. So, with the invention of drones this will eliminate extra time that it takes humans to figure these situations out.

Another reason drones will be in the future technology is that fortune 500 companies such as Amazon and Google are building drones to deliver household items. This will be beneficial because homeowners who are too busy to or need their products that they purchased to be expedited and the drones will be a faster delivery. Using the drones to deliver has some cons such as weather, aviation rules and not being able to hold heavy cargo. Amazon said it would now test drone deliveries with two more customers near Cambridge, an English city where the company has a large drone-testing plant. If the tests are successful, the company says it wants to expand the number of consumers who could participate in the trial to dozens in the coming months, eventually allowing hundreds to use the drone service.


11 reasons to be excited about the future of technology

Autonomous cars

By: Jacquelynne Rattler-Simmons

The world is changing everyday and so is technology. I have been doing research on emerging technologies and the big thing that keeps coming up are autonomous cars. The autonomous car is a self-driving car and is already on the road in some places. Studies are saying that all cars will be self-driving by the year 2050. This new technology will also raise the sticker price on cars from around $7,000 and $10,000 in 2025 but will drop to $3,000 and $5,000 between 2030 and 2035 once no driver controls are available. As this technology improves over time it will be more beneficial.

I don't really know how I feel about them though. It is a great idea, but I just don't think they are safe. Sure your car could be driving lyft or uber for you while you're asleep or working as we discussed in class, but what happens if there is an accident? I believe that this will be our reality in the future and will be the only way to go and by then all the kinks will be worked out. So, if we are not ready for this now, we better get ready.

Self-Driving Cars Moving into the Industry's Driver's Seat | IHS Online Newsroom

Self-Driving Cars Moving into the Industry's Driver's Seat | IHS Online New... Self-driving cars (SDC) that include driver control are expected to hit highways around the globe before 2025 an...

The Future of Driverless Cars

The Future of Driverless Cars Autonomous vehicles have made significant progress in the last decade and should be available to buy very soon. ...

The Future of the cell phone.

By: Onieja Taylor

A short forty-one years ago, Martin Cooper, an engineer for Motorola, had a clever idea of people being able to carry their mobile devices everywhere. In April 1973, Cooper became the first individual to make a call on a portable mobile device. The device weighed more than two pounds, and it took nearly 10 hours to charge for only 35 minutes of conversation. Now a days that idea is strongly hard to believe. Today people cannot live without their cellphones. Joshua Bell, an anthropologist and curator of globalization at the Natural History Museum identifies this idea as true. For the past two years, Bell and Joel Kuipers, an anthropologist at George Washington University, have researched mobile phone culture and how it has become a global phenomenon.

Bell proclaims that phones will literally become a part of us. We also discussed this idea in class. Technology has literally changed so much over the years and it could only get better from here. Bell along with other futurologists believe that phones will become a "remote control" for our daily lives. Rumors have surfaced that maybe phone will be holographic displays. The future phones will also help educationally. It has been predicted that more than one in three children will have a mobile device. Children will be able to use the camera and voice recorder tools as teaching methods. Companies have also looked into eco-friendly mobile devices. At the mobile world congress trade show in 2016, an idea was introduced by Kyocera. It was a solar powered prototype. The phone was originally for those who work outdoors but the company hasn't created a way to charge the phone without a wall charger. There is no denying that cellphones will eventually become one with us humans but there is no telling when.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SlpmivFavU

Monday February 27, 2017 - Class #10 - SWOT analysis

TODAY:

SWOT analysis

SWOT Analysis is a simple but useful framework for analyzing your organization's strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats that you face. It helps you focus on your strengths, minimize threats, and take the greatest possible advantage of opportunities available to you.

Broken into two parts:

1) Chart - outline
2) Analysis


Example
SWOT - Autonomous Cars

1) OUTLINE

2) Analysis

Autonomous driving would create a transportation revolution, not only economically, but culturally.  Handsfield reiterates the common topic of isolationism when he says, “As urbanists, we’ve often succumbed to a gut reaction that cars are bad, transit is good. However, the reality is that it is not cars that are bad, but the single-occupancy driver paradigm that is so damaging to our environment, urban fabric and quality of life.”   While self-driving cars might change the way we own and share automobiles for transportation, will it isolate us further from one another? [5]

The technology itself also poses major threats.  Will the software systems be tamper-proof?  What if someone reprogrammed a self-driving car for malicious purposes?

In order to operate efficiently, there must be a single, ultimate network on which these vehicles communicate and operate with one another.  Privacy concerns will surely arise when your location can be tracked based on your transportation history.  Surely someone will seek to collect and sell that information much the same way your browsing habits are recorded online.  Public response to such an invasion of privacy could have a staggering effect on the implementation of a self-driving automobile into society.

All of these threats (and many more) will likely become factors in the biggest threat to autonomous driving; the special interest lobby.  There are a lot of people with a lot of money that would not like to see the current paradigm of transportation change.  Auto manufacturers, driver’s unions, oil companies, etc.  The list is potentially endless of influential groups that would see self-driving cars as a threat.

Google: Winners/Losers

RISK !

By Karleah Malcolm

We are often scared of the outcome of certain choices and the idea of something not fully resulting how we wanted it to result in. Have you ever thought about the good that may come from taking that risk that you may regret down the line not taking?

As you look back on your career and life to date, where do you wished you'd been a little braver, trusted in yourself more, and been less cautious in the chances you took? 

When I have conversations with people in their thirties and beyond, many have told me if they could do their career over or parts of their lives over again, they'd have taken more risks, settled less and spoken up more. In short, they wished they'd been more courageous in the risks they'd taken.  

We are all still young, but perhaps we all can relate. Often we know what it is we want to do, but we still don't do it. Why? Because, we are innately risk averse and afraid of putting our vulnerability on the line. The status quo, while not particularly fulfilling, can seem like an easier, softer, less scary, option. Today, advances in brain imaging technology can now show and verify that we human beings are wired to be risk averse.

Meaning we find it much easier to settle with the status quo, keep our mouths closed and our heads down rather than make a change, take a chance, or speak up and engage in what I call a "courageous conversation." When weighing up whether to take an action that could leave us vulnerable to failing or some other form or loss (of reputation, money, social standing, pride etc.), we have an innate tendency to misjudge four core elements in assessing risk. While we are all still young, growing, living and learning,

I want to challenge everyone to take more risks. Look forward to different outcomes in each risk taken and don't be the person in their forties looking back on what life could've been if you had just taken that RISK!

BY: Aliyah Ramsey - Future Fashion Technology

Future Fashion Technology

BY: Aliyah Ramsey

 

Technology is advancing and becoming a major part of the world. Fashion is also advancing with technology. With a lot of technology being digital, fashion is becoming more digitalized with clothes and allowing people to live with technology around their bodies. The creators project connects human bodies, emotions, and intimacy with fashion technology. Many of their products and what they create is 3D and has a form of betraying future looks. One particular look created was a bubble dress. 

The bubble dress was made to show different emotions of the heart. The pop artist Lady Gaga and her stylist loved the dress and decided to do a photo shoot campaign to show off the dress. Other artist like Azealia Banks, Black Eyed Peas, and Wayne McGregor also wore their items. Future fashion trends are starting to repeat itself from the past and with the evolution of time and human bodies, the creators project make products to enhance fashion with technology.