Business Environment Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
In this course, you begin the task of identifying a business idea that you will fully develop throughout your journey. It can be a product, service, or other concept for an existing company environment, or a totally new entrepreneurial venture. You will first choose the market domain for your idea, such as transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, or the service industry, for example. This selected domain will be your area of focus throughout the program.
Business environments are constantly changing for many reasons: competition in the marketplace, new technology, and political upheavals, for example. A prudent business manager will need to be able to first recognize and then react to these changes to ensure a company’s survival and profitability. To do this, the manager will evaluate both the internal and external factors that can either inhibit or enable a company’s assets and capabilities to align with market opportunities. For this project, you will choose a market domain such as transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, or the service industry. This selected domain will be your area of focus throughout program. You will research the business environment of this domain, analyzing the trends and internal and external factors that affect businesses within this domain. Through this analysis, you will gain an appreciation of the business environment from a holistic perspective in order to foster innovation and maximize profit potential.
Your business environmental analysis should answer the following prompt: Select a market domain such as transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, or the service industry. This selected domain will be your area of focus throughout the program, although you will be able to change if you need to. Begin by evaluating the business environment of the market domain. Then, select a specific company within the market domain. The company you select should be a company where you can envision intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial opportunities, as you will identify and assess these opportunities in this project. Finally, evaluate the trends relevant to the business environment of your company and market domain.
Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
I. Market Domain: In this section, you will evaluate the current business environment of your selected market domain. Specifically, you should include the following:
A. Historical Significance: Analyze historically significant pivot points or factors that led to dramatic changes and innovation in the business environment of your selected market domain.
B. Factors: Analyze the factors that contributed to the obsolescence or dissolution of notable companies in your selected market domain in the recent past. Make sure to discuss both inhibiting and enabling factors in your analysis.
C. Impact of Factors: Assess the impact of the factors you analyzed on opportunities for change and innovation in the business environment of your selected market domain.
II. Competitive Readiness: In this section, you will select a company within your market domain and then evaluate internal and external factors pertaining to the company’s competitive readiness. Specifically, you should include the following:
A. Internal Factors:
1. SWOT Analysis: Complete a SWOT analysis on the internal factors that affect the company’s readiness to compete. What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats faced by the company relative to the competitive market?
2. Prioritized List: Based on the SWOT analysis, create a prioritized list of strengths to exploit and weaknesses to mitigate. Each item in your list should have supporting rationale.
3. Readiness: Based on internal factors, evaluate the company’s readiness to compete in the business environment of the market domain. Support your evaluation with information from your market domain evaluation and SWOT analysis.