Gauging Forward

                 The evaluated print book market share for Amazon has risen up to above half of the market share with and Barnes & Noble’s just having one-fifth of the entire market share. The dominance of Amazon, in this market space has been consistent for over 14 years with Barnes & Nobles still hanging in there with a massive gap between the two. It is important to mention that after Barnes and Nobles did close 90 out of the 720 locations with the period of seven years, which also, resulted in locations becoming lacking of any bookstore, it appears prepared to call it quits (Pandey, 2018; Majed et al., 2018). Branes and Nobles existed way long even before Amazon made its footprint in the market in 1996, but now, amazon has grown its business and customer base presenting itself as a leader in the book retailing space review (Matousek, 2018; Pandey, 2018). Amazon strives in making the experience book purchasing customers have a...

Serendipity describes an unexpected or coincidental finding that proves to be beneficial and helpful outcome. An example of serendipity is the invention of the microwave ovens by the engineer and inventor Percy Spencer while working at the  Raytheon Corporation as an engineer. It is expedient to mention that the engineer – Percy Spenser attempting to develop a radar-related research project with a new vacuum tube when he realized the melting of the candy bar within his pocket. He did tested it with popcorn (Krueger, 2010). Spencer had the realization of a melting candy bar inside his pocket during his experimentation. He then decided to have the popcorn placed inside the machine and the popping of the corn immediately open up a new innovative and revolutionary device (Bih, 2003; Zhang, 2017). Error inventions are generally discoveries or innovations that came to the limelight through an unintentional action. These often come as a result of a researcher or scientist making a huge mi...

Scenario planning in its simplest terms is art of assuming the future and then making assumptions on the possible outcome of the assumed future. In other words, scenario planning entails the precise identification of a set of undetermined actualities or things that would have been actually experience with the expectation of their possible occurrence in the future of a business. Thus, businesses implement scenario planning for the enablement of decision-makers with the capabilities and platform of identifying a variation or scope of probable effect and the estimated magnitude, response evaluation and management of the different possibilities (Amer, 2013; Ali & Luther, 2020). It is expedient to mention that the application of this integrated approach to uncertainty management cuts across different industries in the estimation of  cashflow, business performance, and risk mitigation strategy development. An example is making presumptions on the future events that might impactfully ...

  The concepts of forecasting and prediction are geared towards future occurrences. Though this similarity in orientation or focus, both concepts has a thin line of differentiation that through could be blurred by contextual usage still shows the existence of a difference between these two concepts. By definition the process of forecasting entails gathering requirements and making a future-state related prediction. Forecasting is data driven and leverages the available data comprising of current and previous data points in predicting the outcome of future event occurrences. In other words, the processes and procedures involved in determining what the future market trends, sales revenue, new product adoption, etc., and the impact vis-à-vis the organizational impact. To greater extent forecasting is classifiable as a sub-discipline of prediction as it generally focused on leveraging time series approaches in prediction making (Döring, 2018). Prediction has the objective of attempting...

Per the Horizon Report 2021, one key technology is Student Data Privacy and Governance. Student data gets collected across different stages of admission and enrollment processes and throughout their entire educational journey at any educational institution through graduation(Kelly et al., 2021). In order to achieve effective protection and storing of student data, the educational institutions (universities and colleges) must have policies that enforce the protection of student data such as multifactor authentication, strong password adoption, as well as vendor compliances with regulatory acts such as HIPPA, FERPA, etc. This should all go alongside a sensitization campaign on information security awareness. Also, having a certain degree of transparency with students on their data collection, storage, and protection; getting informed consent; permitting review and update of student data by students (Kelly et al., 2021).  The Uber Trend – Remote Work is a representation of the novel a...

The recognition and understanding of the ever-growing relationships and interactions between the organizational workforce and workplace technology with the objective of effectuating procedures and processes reflect the sociotechnical structure. The workforce from society represents the social while the organizational structure alongside its technology-driven processes and procedures represents the technical aspects. In this sociotechnical plan technology of focus would be AI Chatbot Driven ERP with which members of the fictional organization's workforce would be communicating and interacting, conforming to a sociotechnical solution within the sociotechnical landscape (Iyer, 2018). It is expedient to mention that a chatbot is an artificial intelligence driven solution with capabilities of providing responses to natural language inputs while attempting to engage in a conversational interaction simulating humans. There are different implementations of chatbots though the bottom line f...

  The case study that comes to mind is Blackberry in the phone and communication industry. BlackBerry was known to be the loader in this space around the world for many years since the advent of smartphones. Many other manufactures perceived black berry as an innovative leader in this space not until blackberry’s quest for innovation slowed down giving way for more innovative and iPhone as Apple gained grounds and acceptability on the use of its ever-innovative and reforming smartphone (Gaikar, 2012). The power of innovation in competitive advantage is demonstrated by the fact that while the iPhone innovative touchscreen became the order of the day, consumers were switching and leaning more against the new user experience built on creativity, whereas blackberry remained glued to its physical keyboard with its concepts that the design is easy to use and send out emails (Gaikar, 2012). It is expedient to mention that the blackberry case study presence a new truth on the role of innov...

The X-Ray The uncovering and invention of X-rays by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen was studying the effect of electric currents on gases in 1895. Roentgen’;s invention of X-rays was an uncovering that happened by chance in the midst of his effort in better ascertaining the impact of electric currents on gases. This process entailed experimenting with electron-discharge tubes of which case when in the course of so doing, he realized the glowing emanating from the fluorescent screen which he had close by. The observation that he had unveiled that the glow was un-blockable by any material and thus he deciding to proceed by tilling into a sheet of film with the objective of carefully observing the sort of impact as he accounted. The observations illustrated a print of his hand (Levi, 2016; A psnews , n.d.). This happened when on November 8, 1895, Roentgen realized that shielding the tubes with heavy black cardboard, causes the glowing of a 9 feet away positioned platinobarium screen to ...

Think tanks primarily embark on sponsoring research on specific problems, encouraging the solution uncovering for associated problems, and facilitating the interactions amongst intellectuals, professionals, and scientists in pursuit of these goals. For example, a public policy think tank might be explicitly focusing on governmental policies with the objective of proposing viable alternatives or enhancing the current policies. This implies, think tanks are not ad hoc commissions, but rather well-structured permanent entities that devote both human and financial resources for purpose achievement (Goodman, 2005; McGann, 2020). Since think tanks do not follow a one size fits all pattern, there are different categorizations of think tanks that are problem-specific (Pautz, 2011). The problem type and purpose of think tank creation and be grouped into five categories including idea combining ideas – promoting interactivity in idea generation and subsequent merging of ideas for an appropriate ...

T he  Delphi technique is a problem-solving technique characterized by systematic forecasting involving a well structurally defined interactivity between a group of professionals or experts on a subject in question. The Delphi technique typically follows through a posting of questionnaires having generally open-ended questions to the panel and seeking individual responses which would be further analyzed, compiled, and ranked upon agreement from each participant (Brady, 2015; Hohmann, 2018). This method is often comprised of a minimum of two rounds with high involvement of expert interactions and contributions through question answering and rationale provision to support specific answers (Ameyaw, 2016; Brady, 2015). The benefit of the sequence of rounds is to accommodate for inevitable revisions and possible changes as the discussions evolve through different rounds. Thus, with the Delphi method, there is a gathering of a consensus and choice on a predetermined topic without necess...