General Company Description & Products, Services and Industry(s) Analysis and Trends
Length:? 10 - 25 pages, double-spaced (Times New Roman, 12 point font with standard 1" margins).
Assignment : ? Develop a Mission & Vision Statement & Innovation Description and Industry & Trends Analysis.
1. Gain instructor approval of the "right size" innovation.
2. For this first assignment you will review what you have learned in your MBA program, specifically classes BUSU 650, OLCU 613, OLCU 615, and OLCU 632. If you do not have the textbooks you can review your work product from those classes. If you have any Significant Sentence exercises you will find them very helpful.
3. Perform a Literature Review from sources in the Brandman Library and include sources from The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company and academic journals and especially .gov websites for demographics (never use a Wiki "anything) for graduate work. This literature review will provide journals on the industry, category (or categories) of innovation and all related fields.This Literature Review is not handed in but is an excellent habit for MBA graduates to acquire as they research important issues.
Keep all of the sources in one place on your computer (this will save you hours of time later). After 1 & 2 above you will develop the vision for your organization and structure of your Business Plan. In five to twelve pages, you will:
1) prepare an outline of the key points you want your readers to grasp (the skeleton of your Executive Summary);
2) describe the conditions that bode well for your proposed company (your Situation Analysis); and
3) detail the company you want to create and the products and/or services you will bring to market. Remember that everything you write about for the Mission and Vision will weave through to the future sections for the paper.
For example if your mission includes the concept of teamwork, then in your management (how you attract, develop and retain your workers), marketing how you will show teamwork in your marketing materials and further in your operations plan how teamwork will be fostered. So, the mission and vision needs to be apparent throughout the rest of the plan.
In this first assignment you will write about the company you plan to create and will give specifics of the products and services and the industries in which the innovation resides. Plan to offer as well as research on the industry and the trends within that industry. Some will have more than one industry to cover as the innovation comes from two industries.
For example, like Pixar is a technology company as well as within the entertainment industry.You will describe your company in terms of what value or need it will bring to the marketplace. Describe the Mission and Values of your organization. Explain the ways that your business will be thought of as an ethical enterprise.
Before you begin to write, think deeply about a value that your organization will bring to the industry(s) in which your business will operate. This is very important. Your business will provide either a product or a service (or both like a water purification system where equipment is sold (product) and a service warranty is offered. Begin to think about your new company. Remember that 80% of new businesses fail.
What steps are you going to take from the beginning to be sure that your new business is one of the 20% that is successful? As much as you can, research other organizations that currently offer something close to your business - learn from their successes and their failures. Keep track of this research as it will be a valuable part of this paper.
Make notes on how your organization will offer the product or service. Once again, develop the mission and values of your organization and tie those values to your company description and especially to the products and or service you will offer. Now (after instructor approval) you can begin to write your paper for this assignment.
The following describes key points that need to be covered in Assignment 1.
Mission & Vision Statement & Innovation Description
The mission and vision should be carefully crafted. There should be sufficient evidence of how operational, financial, management, and marketing plans are executed in light of the innovation's mission and vision. This should be about two pages long and remember the mission statement should be short enough to fit on a t-shirt.
The vision statement is sometimes a paragraph with bullets. The innovation description should take up another page to a page and a half and should be focusing on the unique opportunity that the innovation brings to the marketplace. This language should be clean, clear, and easy to understand for people outside of the industry (as funding sources are often not "insiders").
Company Description (proposed new organization):
? Type of Business and Legal Structure (e.g., LLC, sole proprietorship)
? Clear, concise and interesting description of what the innovation is uniquely bringing to the marketplace
? Distinctive Core Competencies, overview of the location, financial viability, etc.
? Consumer demographic that is interested in buying/using this new product or service
? If there is any technology include simple, clean, and clear language to describe it
Industry & Trends Analysis (state of the industry, market research, barriers to entry, identifying competitors, identifying market niche, expert advice, competitive analysis, strategic positioning)
This is the section where writers need to perform a "preliminary SWOT analysis" that will need further data and research. It is also the first long section that is usually ten to twenty pages long with more than ten sources. Often this section includes three to four graphs describing the industry, competition, and industry evolution, all with cited data from academic and business sources:
? The history of the industry
? Size of the industry
? Industry evolution
? The trend--where the industry is expected to be in five to ten years
? The key players in the industry (those who do something like this well and those who do not, something different)
? Perform a competitive advantage analysis (what is currently available so in the next section it can be shown how the competition)
? Barriers and challenges to entering the market
? Environmental scan
? Significant factors in the macro environment
The section presents a clear statement of the opportunities and threats through preliminary SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis connects to the research and results in data-driven decision making. Other issues include but are not limited to:
? Copyrights, patents, & intellectual property rights
? Research & development activities
? Failures in the industry
? Opportunities
? Changes in the market
? Description if the innovation is a product or a service or a products & a service, what this product means for the industry
? Research & development activities