SM Assignment II

Karunesh Mathur , Roll No.17,MBA IB14-17

Q1. What Role can Top Management play in helping a company achieve
Superior Efficiency, Quality, and Innovation & Customer
Responsiveness?
Q2. In What sense innovation be called single most important building
block of competitive advantage?

Answer 1:
A company can increase efficiency through a number of steps:
Exploiting economies of scale and learning effects,
Adopting flexible manufacturing technologies,
Reducing customer defection rates,
Implementing just-in-time systems,
Getting the R&D function to design products that are easy to
manufacture,
Upgrading the skills of employees through training,
Introducing self-managing teams
Linking pay to performance,
Building a companywide commitment to efficiency through strong
leadership,
And designing structures that facilitate cooperation among different
functions in pursuit of efficiency goals.
Achieving superior quality demands an organization wide commitment
to quality and a clear focus on the customer. It also requires metrics to
measure quality goals and incentives that emphasize quality, input from
employees regarding ways in which quality can be improved, a
methodology for tracing defects to their source and correcting the

problems that produce them, a rationalization of the companys supply

base, cooperation with the supplier that remain to implement total
quality management programs, products that are designed for ease of
manufacturing, and substantial cooperation among functions.
To achieve superior innovation, a company must build skills in basic and
applied research; design good processes for managing development
projects; and achieve close integration between the different functions of
the company, primarily through the adoption of cross-functional product
development teams and partly parallel development processes.
To achieve superior responsiveness to customers often requires that the
company achieve superior efficiency, quality, and innovation. To achieve
superior responsiveness to customers, a company needs to give
customers what they want when they want it.
It must ensure a strong customer focus, which can be attained by
emphasizing customer focus through leadership; training employees to
think like customers; bringing customers into the company through
superior Market research; customizing products to the unique needs of
individual customers or customer groups; and responding quickly to
customer demands.

Answer 2:
Reference to the service industry, and understanding Innovation as one
of the core competency of the service organization.
Services have become the uncompromisable core component of business
and, from a management perspective; they have evolved to assume a
strategic function. Service leaders successfully introduce products and
services to the market far in advance of customer expectation. Moreover,
in the customers mind, a firm maintains its market leadership position
by continuing to operate at the cutting-edge and by extending

conventional parameters. Service firms today are expected to delight

customers with their creativity and innovation. Thus, in operational
terms, innovation can be translated as a firms foresight to think for the
customer by creating services that drive the marketplace offer
superior value to the customer).
Success stories of firms and individuals in various parts of the world are
often featured in business magazines and books. In most cases, their
advances in their chosen fields have not been the result of hard work.
Service leaders have not only developed new services as collective
packages but, in the process, have created new markets often initiating
the growth of a new industry. Todays managers are not concerned about
the challenges caused by the short life-cycle of products and services
but, rather, by the possibility of the disappearance of an entire industry.
For example, the displacement of the multimillion-dollar music records
industry by the introduction of CDs stands as testimony to this
phenomenon. Moreover, innovated products and services indirectly
destroy the demand for the old, as the latter prove less valuable to the
customer.
Innovation or creativity per se are of limited significance in todays
evolving business continuum, as it is the value of the innovation as
perceived by the customer that renders an advantage to a product
or service.
Innovation results when a firm is able to focus its entire energies
to think on behalf of the customer for an outcome that surpasses
customers present expectation of superior value.
Innovation, therefore, nurtures a culture in which there are fewer
hindrances to the creation of a synergy of thoughts and actions on
behalf of the customer.

 Customers today expect firms to delight them with creativity.

Hence, continuous and creative innovation undertaken by a firm on
behalf of the customer is, indeed, the only strategy that can sustain
the long-term success of the firm.