Competencies
In this project, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following
competency:
Evaluate creative and innovative organizational structures
Recommend alternative innovations to solve an internal or market
need
Implement creative and innovative processes within an organization
Scenario
You work as a middle manager for one of the top U.S. producers of luxury
and mass-market automobiles and trucks.
The chief technology officer (CTO) of the company from the course
scenario has been watching new technology developments that the
company could integrate into its vehicles to enhance the usefulness of and
access to the data acquired by the many digital sensors that have been
integrated into vehicle subsystems over the past 20–30 years. The
technology trend of particular interest is the internet of things (IoT)—the
interconnection of embedded devices, such as sensors and computers, over
the internet. By taking advantage of this trend, the CTO believes the
company can seize an opportunity to provide better service and predictive
maintenance to its customers, improving customer satisfaction and adding
additional revenue streams.
Based on briefings by the CTO, senior management has decided to
implement IoT in its product line. Your CTO has asked you to lead a cross-
functional team to take this initiative forward. Your first task is to make a
recommendation for how the company should approach this business
problem. Do you recommend using incremental or discontinuous (that is,
slow or fast) innovation? Specifically:
Should the company...
A. Design a completely new product line, based on the new technology
(discontinuous innovation)
or
B. Add new technology features into one model and then incrementally
into the broader product line (incremental innovation)
The recommendation you and your team make is an important first step in
pursuing this new technology.
In Milestone One, you and your team defined what that innovation looked
like: would it be disruptive (new product line) or incremental (new features
in one existing product)?
In Milestone Two, you developed a strategy plan and a high-level business
model. You’ve shared these with various stakeholders, and they are in
agreement with your assessment of how best to get to market with this IoT
innovation, which will allow the company to be competitive.
Now, the CTO has asked you to come up with a proposed organizational
structure that will support the innovation implementation. In this way, you
will be assisting in making the innovation sustainable for the company from
the course scenario. Companies that are innovative must make sure they
have structured the organization in a way that supports innovation, and a
key component of innovation is keeping track of what their customers want
in terms of products and services.
