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Posts Tagged ‘First’

If you are an individual or a small team not yet operating as a business, starting first on business model innovation sounds like it’s impossible. The world is full of long-standing companies that seem to be serving virtually every conceivable need.

However, can you serve those needs by employing new business models in a better way? Probably you can. And if you can, then you can be the first to compete based on business model innovation.

Notice that business model innovation usually requires more mental agility than resources, so the playing field is either level or may be slightly tilted in your direction. As you work on business model innovation, pay attention to closing the competitive door behind you with impossible-to-duplicate advantages, though, so that others cannot leapfrog past you if you want to enjoy the ultimate competitive advantage from business model innovation.

Let’s consider an example. Commercial art schools had been operating for decades when Education Management started out in 1969 by purchasing the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

How could the company be first with an improved business model in other geographic markets where commercial art was already being taught by for-profit schools and by tax exempt public or private colleges and universities?

What Education Management did was to focus the commercial art learning process on the needs of employers. In doing so, the company knew that it would also better serve the needs of students by making it easier for them to get, hold, and make career progress in commercial art jobs. To make this adjustment, Education Management made seven changes in the commercial art school business model:

(1) continually define, update and add to the curriculum around employers’ current and future needs, and actively involve employers in the curricula development process through participation in local curricula advisory committees and in special subject panels

(2) employ faculty who are working professionals for career specific subjects

(3) build the curriculum to concentrate on what students need to learn

(4) create facilities and technology specialized to facilitating learning about the professional career environment

(5) help graduates get jobs

(6) reach out extensively to potential students become aware of these educational and career choices.

(7) acquire and rapidly convert small local art and culinary schools into the Education Management business model though substantial investments, and installing detailed planning and information systems to manage those operations according to the Education Management business model.

With this new business model, Education Management could become the first commercial art school in a geographic area to offer greater diversity of education programs in the art, design, and culinary fields, with a superior faculty, facilities, technology, and job market outreach. Note that the business model could either be used to shift the direction an existing school that was acquired (like the Art Institute of Pittsburgh had been) or to start a new school from the ground up.

Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

“Get there first with the most . . . .”

– Nathan Bedford Forrest

“. . . model to thy inward greatness . . . .”

– Shakespeare

Many of the most attractive business model innovations will allow only one company to prosper by following that particular path. Even better is the circumstance where once that path is taken by anyone, many other potentially attractive paths are made smaller or are permanently closed off for others. In an industry in which little business model innovation has occurred, a disproportionate potential for success can be grasped by the first company to take such a dominating track. Having started down that path usually then provides new advantages and opportunities to make even more innovations. Each implemented innovation that builds on a previous, unduplicated one then becomes another brick helping to wall off competitive vulnerability.

Those who start new companies are likely to focus on providing a better way to solve a customer’s problem or serve a customer’s need. In technology companies, this direction is even more likely to occur through emphasizing a new technology. Come back to the same company two decades later, and often the same “breakthrough” solution is still being provided rather than having been replaced with something better. Such a company finds itself vulnerable both to start-ups who are looking for the next improved way to serve customers and to established companies that are more focused on developing better solutions.

Think about Polaroid. Founded by the inventive Edwin Land, the company was the first to perceive the attractions of being able to provide photographic images within seconds. Professional photographers could use these quickly produced images to test the lighting for traditional photographic exposures. Families could check to see if the snapshot meant for the family album had the desired image or not. If not, they could reshoot until an image met their expectations. Polaroid’s solution depended on sophisticated interactions of chemicals, electronics, and mechanics.

But traditional photography kept improving its quality. Professional quality cameras, lenses, and film became inexpensive enough for many people to buy, and the skill of amateurs developed. A Polaroid image just didn’t look as good by comparison. Polaroid photography came to mean fast, expensive, and not very good.

The company’s speed advantage became less significant, too. Fast development centers opened up in many drug stores, offering one hour prints for ordinary film.

Then the digital revolution arrived, and a digital camera could provide an test image to check faster and cheaper than the Polaroid process. In digital form, photography fans could also more conveniently store, crop, and print their photographs.

Polaroid sales and profits were spoiled in the process. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001.

Companies must focus on providing superior results for customers to what the alternatives are, regardless of the method used for providing those results. If that means pioneering or adopting a new business model or technology, then that’s the route the company must take. In Polaroid’s case, the company may have needed to partner with firms that had other kinds of expertise in order to deliver on its purpose, providing high-quality, fast images. By focusing on technological innovation rather than business model innovation, the firm faltered despite having had a large historical lead in serving its customers and end users. Just as easily, a technology can be a blindfold that causes better solutions not to be seen.

Technology companies should heed this example or they will find themselves looking at a technological evolutionary dinosaur in the form of their own company’s latest enhanced offerings based on the same old technology platform. Could even the technology-agnostic Cisco Systems fall prey to this same vulnerability in the future? Time will tell, but new protocols for transferring information are very likely to be created that better fit future data sending and receiving needs. Such a shift could make irrelevant solutions optimized to the current protocols. Who would win such a race to provide the best new solutions? Typically, it would be a new entrant, especially if the new entrant employs an improved business model as well as a new technology.

Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

Drum is one of the most popular music instruments. Drums are played everywhere, be a music concert or any religious gathering or a popular event like foot ball tournament. Many music-enthusiastics including school children and young people wish to have their own drum kits. But contrary to popular belief buying the first drum kit is not an easy one. As drum kit consists of various parts like kikdrum, kick pedal and numerous other parts, it involves a huge expenditure and planning.

First step in buying a drum kit is estimating the budget. Drums come with wide range of price tags. But the advantage here over other instruments is that one need not buy all the drums and the accessories in one go. They can be purchased one by one as and when the budget permits and can be assembled as per convenience. One can start with single drum and sticks and increase one by one gradually. Starter packs and junior drum sets are good money savers while performing quality music.

A complete drum set consists of Kick Drum with Pedal, Snare Drum with Pedal. Hi-Hate Cymbals with stands, Crash cymbal, Drum Throne and Drum sticks, and also a Floor Tom and a second mounted tom. Here are some important components of drum kit.

Normally, shell packs do not include stand and other accessories. Inexpensive shell kits are made of mahogany or basswood where as the higher end models use birch or maple in order to produce rich tones. The stands in which the drums and cymbals are fitted are known as hardware. Good hardware is made of chrome as they can withstand the heavy beatings. Bass Drum is a big drum fixed on the floor and a foot pedal is used to play them.

Snare drum is kept on a stand between the player’s legs and has head top and bottom. Tension rods are used to fasten the heads with the rims. There are series of parallel mounted metal strands tightly stretched across called snares. Snares can be adjusted using a switch provided in the side of the drum.

Toms are other drums that come with drum kit. Tom drums have deep round tones and are mounted on Mounted Toms. Toms with legs are called Floor Toms. Cymbals are one of the important elements in any drum kit. They are made of an alloy of brass and bronze. There are different types of Cymbals that produces variety of accents and variations. For beginners cymbal starter pack is the best option which consists of a crash cymbal, a ride cymbal and a couple of hi-hates.

Drum sticks are simple but are very important elements of drum kit. Many drums come with sticks and others do not. It is very important to check whether the sticks are accompanied with the drum. If not, it should be purchased along with the drums.

Never mind the chicken or the egg. The burning philosophical question of our cyber age is, which came first, the PHP tutorial script or the website? You see the list of instructions that your PC follows when it displays a website on your screen, the software in other words is a symbolic language called PHP. It’s called a language, but it is a language very unlike English, whether it is US or UK or any other kind.

Unlike language as we humans think of it, PHP tutorial scripts are not meant to be heard or listened too or even spoken. PHP tutorial scripts are learnt by people in order to be written and then ‘read’ and operated by computers alone.

PHP tutorial scripts are strings of symbols that operate only as pixels on screen and as digital data on your computers hard disk and on the servers of your Internet service provider. So have you ever wondered what happens to all those web pages, words and images when you move away from the website?

I always imagine them to be like the hologram of Princess Leia in the Star Wars movie. When you open up a website the PHP script leaps to life in front of your eyes and just as quickly reverts to PHP encoded script when you maneuver away from any particular site. So if nobody is visiting your website at any given time does it exist at all? Rather it only exists as a PHP tutorial script. That is to say PHP tutorial scripts only exist in a symbolic world until activated and then they only exist in a different symbolic world as long as you are looking at them. “Help me Obi Wan, you’re my only hope!”

Now you can go to PHP tutorial script websites and learn to write the language of PHP scripts that will then generate websites of infinite variety and designed to your PHP scripting. (Really it isn’t as difficult as becoming a Jedi knight). So hence the question that we began with, (boy aren’t you glad you started this?) which came first the PHP tutorial script or the website?

Am I just contemplating my navel or does all this PHP tutorial script talk have anything to do with real life. Well quite a lot actually. “Search your feelings Luke. You know it’s true”? You can turn a PHP tutorial script into cash and earn a very good living as a PHP programmer.

The online job site oDesk is finding that number of projects for PHP programmers is growing faster than any other freelance sector and the wages paid for these projects are rising faster too. ODesk also report that “overall, PHP demand was twice that of any other programming language. Open source technology, led by PHP and MySQL, is by far the skill set in highest demand today.”

PHP tutorial scripts are better than any other coding platform because it is free. Very flexible and offers a huge support network of other PHP scripters. There is an extensive library of PHP tutorial scripts that can be tailored, are transferable and match to fit almost any web application.

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