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 innovation within the competitive landscape – how much success of a
product could have in the market could be impacted by innovation which is
driven by strategy implemented within the business ecosystem such as scenario
type planning (Jacobides, 2013).
The Support of
Scenario-type Planning and Innovation
Blackberry did not do a robust scenario type planning
but rather reliant on demand forecasting. It is expedient to mention that
scenario type-planning entails analyzing different business scenarios
strategically taking into consideration future or long-term possibilities. Blackberry
was the iconic brand at the time but yest lack the appropriate planning framework
that could improve the decision making prioritization which could also
facilitate or result in the company retaining their position as a major market
leader in the smartphone sector. It is also important to note that scenario
planning could be beneficial in supporting other side projects and researching
possibilities in the midst of uncertainties on how to make considerations on
emerging trends and improving existing products per consumer needs. The
application of scenario type planning is beneficial in realization of possible
outcomes which could be highly instrumental in guiding Blackberry’s awareness
to what might be more suitable for consumers. Some companies apply these
technics involving the public for a more holistic view of external orientation
supporting planning and innovation for sicario or insight driven changes. This
would have prevented the failure to gain market share that has resulted in
blackberry just having a minuscule 3% of the market share. Scenario-type
planning support is strong driving forces behind innovation as it facilitates
analyzing gaps and uncovering novel opportunities. The opinion that brand
arrogance remains a contributing factor for the failure of blackberry, is to a
greater extent worth consideration because even after the moved away from the
keyboard, blackberry decided to keep it through and rather engaged in copying
features from the competition which didn’t work for their advantage (Dougherty,
n.d.).
The Forces Impacting
& Their Impact
Behavioral force is a major force impacting the
blackberry case study as the company did not speeding up their adaptive cycle.
This is a major reason for them lagging behind in the competition. They had
been too contented with their current design and instead of adapting or
innovating to newer designed which were customer driven, the company decided to
remain rigid and was looking for reasons why their design was still the best. That
is not the best of behavior for a leader especially in the ever evolving and
innovating tech space. This was demonstrated also by the fact that upon after
Apple introduced the iPad, Blackberry rapidly responded presenting their
playbook into the market in attempt to match up the competition. The downside
of this approach was a cyclic adaptation misalignment due to rushing of
competitive products which results in quality loss such as the failure
triggered by Blackberry’s fast response with the Playbook tablet (Moussi,
n.d.). The Managerial force is another major reason why blackberry lost over to
the competition and remained behind. This is demonstrated by the fact that
pre-iPhone, or before 2007, there was the existence of little or no competition
in the space of secure data communication networks like BBM, email services,
with most of their mobile devices being the state of the art. This let to them
not doing any sort of rigorous scenario planning but rather focused on the
approach of refining their existing technologies. This lack of radical
innovations driven by the management resulted in their losing of competitive
strategy when faced with a stronger competitor.
Approach to
Implementing Scenario planning for future innovations
Implementing scenario planning is future innovations
from my perspective is considered inevitable especially with the high degree of
uncertainty and ever-changing technological perspective. This process would
entail carefully defining the scope taking into consideration the timeframe in
this case with respect to technological changes and bring the different
stakeholders onboard for maximum participation and support. Next would be the
identification of the different future trends gauged from different
perspectives including, technological, societal, scientifical, environmental,
as well as the different uncertainties surrounding these trends. Next would be
the development of learning scenarios and the identification of research needs.
It is expedient to mention that the different new opportunities would be
perceived, identified and generated with
differences in opinion taking into consideration.
Scenario plan
Accounting for Social impact
Scenario planning takes social impact of a change
into consideration because the societal force could be a major force impacting
the change. So societal trends should also be taking into consideration when
doing scenario planning. Besides, the influence of social impact as a major
prerequisite for development and the well-being implies that scenario planning
for social sector should be accounted for within a scenario plan (Hoteit et
al., 2010).
The Forces Supporting
the Invention
The forces impacting included the medical society as
the acceptance from the society was key to adoption of this new invention. He
did a presentation before the Würzburg Physico-Medical Society and the
proceedings of this mas documented in his first publication. The rapid spread
of the news regarding the new invention across the world and the medical
society and the desire of other scientist such as Thomas Edison to take the
discovery a step further demonstrated acceptance. Besides, as early as February
1896 the usage of X-rays by the medical community was already ongoing in a
first clinical usage in Dartmouth, MA in the United States (Apsnews, n.d.).
References
Dougherty, T. (n.d.).
The failure of blackberry. Retrieved from
https://www.stealingshare.com/blackberry-failed-marketing-lessons-to-be/
Gaikar, V. (2012). BlackBerry
vs iPhone: Which is better for Business?. Retreievd from
https://www.tricksmachine.com/2012/04/blackberry-vs-iphone.html
Hoteit, L., Daniel, C.,
Flynn, A., Farah, S. (2010). Why the Social Sector Needs Scenario Planning Now.
BCG Global. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/why-social-sector-needs-scenario-planning
Jacobides, M. G. (2013).
Blackberry forgot to manage the ecosystem. Business Strategy Review, 24(4),
8-8.
Moussi, A., & van
Amsterdam, U. (2017). Mini-Case Study: The Downfall of Blackberry. Universteit
van Amsterdam, 5.
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