[Adam Stone]

MCQ 1   3/3

1.)    All of the following indicate business model innovation (BMI) EXCEPT:

a.) Google’s 180 degree inversion, from the traditional model of annoying 90% to reach the 10%, to reaching 90% but annoying 10%.

b.) Visa offering payWave, a new technology that doesn’t require a user to swipe their card.

c.) Cirque De Soleil creating a blue ocean market by shifting the focus from three stages and animal acts to one stage focusing on human acts whilst appealing to a theatre audience.

d.) Amazon introducing the Kindle, which allows its users to purchase and download books to the palm of their hands as an alternative to purchasing individual phsical copies of a book.

e.) As mentioned in Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Google offers its users cloud services (Document, Spreadsheets, Presentation)  at no cost to users, as opposed to traditional expensive software.

 

MCQ 2    3/3

All of the following are mentioned in the book The Future of Management, EXCEPT:

a.) The information economy’s most important source of productivity is creativity, and it is not possible to create interesting things in a constant hurry or in a regulated way from nine to five.

b.) The management paradigm of the last century focusing on control and efficiency, no longer suffices in today's world of adaptability and creativity.

c.) The main driver of long-term business success is a combination of operational excellence, technological breakthroughs, and new business models.

d.) In the past century we haven’t seen many dramatic changes in business management practices, instead we are refining the same techniques developed by pioneers such as Fredrick Taylor and Max Weber.

e.) To build an adaptable company, managers need to worry less about weeding out low-probability ideas, and more about building a diverse portfolio of non-incremental strategic options.

 

MCQ 3    4/3

All of the following concepts from Busines Model Generation are true, EXCEPT:

                a.)  The trick in finding the most suitable Channels for your product, is to find the right balance between the different types of channels, integration of them in a way to create a great customer experience, and to maximize revenues while doing so. (p.4)

b.)  The Business Model Canvas consists of nine business model building blocks: Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Resources, Key Activities, Key Partnerships, and Cost Structure.  (p.7)

c.) When different types of businesses are present in the same company, driven by different priorities that conflict with each other or produce undesirable trade-offs, its often wise to “bundle” them together so they can be managed as a whole. (p.9)

d.) “Freemium” is a Free business model pattern which blends free basic services with paid premium services such as Flickr or Yahoo.  This is financed by those customers willing to pay the premium. (p. 12)

e.) To create a business model using the concepts presented, you must first Mobilize your model through the nine building blocks and Business Model Canvas, Understand the elements needed for the business effort, Design based on inquiry and not getting stuck on a select number of ideas, Implementation of the design in alignment of Galbraith’s five areas, and Manage in a fashion that can successfully grow. (p. 19-22)

 

MCQ 4   3/3

All of the following are important concepts from The Quest for Resilience, EXCEPT?

 

a) Success no longer hinges on momentum, but rather the ability to dynamically reinvent business models and strategies as circumstances change. (p53)

 

b) An organization that hopes to become resilient must overcome its cognitive (denial, nostalgic, arrogance), strategic (awareness and ability to create new strategies), political (focus resources on the future, not past) and ideological challenges (continuous and opportunity driven renewal). (p54)

 

c) To overcome denial a company must be involved with where changes happen first, figure out where your visionaries lie and make sure their views can be put on the table, and face up to the inevitability of strategy decay. (p57-58)

 

d) Strategies decay because they either get replicated and lose their distinctiveness, get supplanted by better strategies, get exhausted as the market becomes saturated (red ocean), or get eviscerated where consumers gain power that producers once had. (p58)

 

e) The ability to produce millions of gadgets, handle millions of transactions, or deliver a service to millions of customers is a good sign that your company is in a position that requires little positioning for strong resilience. (p62)

 

MCQ 5   3/3

The following concepts are key takeaways from the article Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage, EXCEPT:

 

a)      In today’s business environment, it is more important to be flexible at learning how to do new things, instead of focusing your energies into one thing that the business does well.

 

b)      Businesses must focus on the signals sent by the external environment, decode them, and act quickly to refine or reinvent its business model and even reshape the information landscape of its industry. (p138)

 

c)       Instead of using traditional methods of research and forecasting, companies should seek new innovative ways such as virtual environments to produce a larger number of innovative of innovative ideas faster, and at lower cost. (p138)

 

d)      Companies must focus on a single company or business unit when trying to detect signals from other businesses and experimenting with customers about which direction to take the business. (p139)

 

e)      Several tactics such as focusing on the “mavericks”, identifying and addressing uncertainties, putting an initiative on every risk, examining multiple alternatives and increasing the clock speed, have proven to be effective at fostering effective adaptive advantages. (p141)

 

MCQ 6    3/3

All of the following are important concepts from the article, Beating the Odds When You Launch a New Venture, EXCEPT:

a.) The most effective corporate innovators are those who identify and find creative ways of removing risk.  (p.94)

b.) When assessing risk its important to spot deal-killer risks, path-dependent risks, and risks that can be resolved without spending a lot of time or money. (p.95)

c.) In general, its good to select a "stake in the ground" customer to identify a rough price point in which customers can be served. (p.96)

d.) Experiments should confirm that your initial ideas were indeed correct, but not redirect the venture entirely. (p.97)

e.) Identifying and prioritizing risks correctly and then conceiving and funding experiments to resolve them systematically will make the launching process as efficient as possible. (p.97)