Monthly Archives: November 2014

By definition, social enterprises are led by social entrepreneurs who are determined to interrupt the status-quo of the current world and bring positive changes to the well-being of others through the operation of its enterprise or foundation, whereas the United Nations is an international organization that is ‘committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights.’

A reason of the United Nations and social enterprise’s co-existence is the difference between their scope. The United Nation is an international organization among nations, therefore it focus on issue that has been raised to the national or even global level, such as peace-keeping in war-torn areas and poverty-preventing in underdeveloped countries. On the other hand, social enterprise are focus to serve the mass on a smaller scope. Being an enterprise, it focus on solving the problem of a firm, a small group of individuals or even just an individual, such as financial aids to a firm or individual, or health check of a small village. 

The United Nations also differs with social enterprise from the focal areas of their service. The United Nations is the ultimate conductor of the globe. Its services cover the majority of problems human beings are currently facing. It has many branches of sub-organizations such as UNICEF and UN Peacekeeping, which focus on individual areas of the entire service coverage. Different from the UN, most social enterprise focus on providing one type of service thoroughly and professional. For example, Dr. Mohammad Yunus has been providing micro-finance to underprivileged peasants living in rural areas of Bangladesh since 1976, which enabled millions of them to escape from the vicious cycle of poverty.

Overall, even though both have a common goal towards improving the well-being of the current generation and creating a better world for future generations of humans, social enterprise hold significant differences from the United Nations. We need the United Nations to act as a coordinator of all nations and solve large scaled problems that affect nations of even the globe. Whereas we need social enterprise, one similar to the Arc initiate, to go into the roots of a society, detect and take initiative to solve problem at a level where it is closer to the life of individual but unreachable from the UN’s level of operation.

In Annice Chang’s blog, she commented on the article from The Globe and Mail and suggested the Wantering to focus on their marketing structure to achieve cultural coherence on operation.  While my agreement lies with Annice’s view on the importance of a thorough understanding on their marketing structure, I would also recommend the firm to slow its pace of development and have a more steady progress of expansion than the current one.

Wantering was launched in late 2011 by Matt Friesen and several other co-founders. It has made a significant expansion in mere three years. It achieved an audience of nearly one million, it acquired a LA-based fashion social network called StyledOn and it opened two branch offices in New York and Los Angeles. However, such development can cause potentially risky problems. Given the size of Wantering’s business, it is incongruent that the company merely has fourteen employees in total. Although the number is small, Wantering is still struggling to reach a common company culture since they are spread across the continent where seven are in the headquarter in Vancouver, four in New York and two in Los Angeles. What’s more, Wantering is suffering incoherence due to not only geographical diversity, but also clashes between enterprise cultures due to its acquisition of StyledOn. “Merging two completely discrete teams into one cohesive unit takes some challenges,” Mr. Friesen says. “It’s further exacerbated by the fact that we’re all in so many different locations.”

(source: blogs.sas.com)

A diversity in corporate culture benefits Wantering with a global outlook of fashion design and enables Wantering to take the lead in its market with international outreach on newest fashion trends of different geographical locations, however it appears to be too soon and costly for Wantering to enter this stage as a start-up company with only three years of market experience. Instead of going global in this early stage, I recommend Wantering to focus on the Vancouver market at this moment since it is where its headquarters is located. Even though a cultural diversity is important for a fashion company, it is also essential to emphasize on a clear and strong enterprise culture. This culture can not be gained through a diverse office locations, but only raised by a consistent implementation of its corporate spirit. After reaching a coherence on the enterprise culture, it can then bring geographical and cultural diversity with expansion of the firm to further strength the existing common corporate spirit among different branches.

We were honoured to have three Sauder alumni in this week’s lecture to share with us their stories and experience of starting their own business. Among all three, the most interesting story to me was Paul Davidescu with his company Tangoo. 

Paul Davidescu’s Tangoo is an app that serves as a pocket concierge to any users. It suggests a list of perfect dining places tailored to the user by understanding his mood and occasion. This business really caught me eyes as I personally hold a strong interest to the technology industry. Through his story-telling, I learnt many insights to this potential option of my future career that I was highly anticipated of. 

Firstly, he emphasized on the importance of being unique in this business. With the fast development of technology nowadays, the number of apps in any app store is growing rapidly. It is important to catch users and be outstanding from the massive pool of apps. Tangoo, despite being a startup, achieved so with its unique functionality. It it the first app that serves as a personal outing planning tool, hence many users seek out to the entire app store but find only Tangoo. The uniqueness in functionality is able to create a niche market for Tangoo, thus allowing it to focus on a group of users with specific desires and creating a profit.

Secondly, understanding the consumer behaviour in the market is another key to success. It was crucial for Paul to notice a desire of an outing assistant, however, it was more important to have a thorough analysis on the mobile application market and discover a broad market demand for such product. After initiating the idea of Tangoo, Paul also understood that ‘once a user finds a satisfactory app that exactly matches his need, he will be reluctant to switch’. This resulted into an almost one-year-long period of design and refining of Tangoo. Therefore, when it was finally released in the store earlier this year, it was able to soon reach a high user satisfaction rate due to the flawlessness of its initial product.

Lastly, he expressed his understanding on specialization of a mobile application. Paul suggested that specialization is important for a mobile application because ‘people tend to use one app for one purpose only’. Tangoo serves only one purpose — outing planning, but it does the job well. Although he later on revealed a plan of establishing a platform of multi-functional softwares in the future, Paul still emphasized on the importance of specializing on one function during the initial stage of an application. He believes a clearer purpose helps to build a stronger brand image and propose a more direct value to users.

In Shira Ovide’s blog entry from the Wall Street Journal, she shared her views of Microsoft’s choice of giving away its Office 365 mobile apps for free. I found myself in agreement with many of her points, and I would also like to explain my thoughts on this important strategic move of Microsoft.

(source: www.powerobjects.com)

Microsoft recently announced that it will provide the new Office 365 app for free all both iOS and Android platforms. It is a bold move considering Microsoft’s supreme position in office softwares since its groundbreaking first Microsoft Office set. Before this announcement, users are required to pay an annual subscribing fee, starting at $70, to obtain full access to Microsoft’s latest office software. With a recently announced and still increasing number of seven million users, sales of the Office 365 signifies a large sector of Microsoft’s revenue from software retailing.

Although appears to be questionable on the surface, Microsoft’s decision is more understandable when scrutinized from the company’s shift in strategy. This change underscores new-assigned CEO Satya Nadella’s focus on market expansion rather than mere profit maximization. Unlike the past period of Microsoft’s dominance in the market of office software, competition rapidly increased with the emergence of softwares such as Evernote, Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote app, and Google’s Docs and Sheets. These alternatives feature similar functionality but offer much more cheaper prices than Microsoft’s Office 365. Furthermore, disruptive innovators like Evernote popularized a trend of price differentiation in the office software market. Most office softwares began to provide fundamental users a standard version of the software for free, but require paid subscription for premium features. These changes in the market pushes Microsoft to react with a more strategic transformation to maintain its high number of users.

With the increasing popularity of mobile working, the free offer of Office 365 on mobile platforms shows that Microsoft is not bowing to competition.It is a decision resulted from accurate analysis of external opportunities and threats in the business, and it shows Microsoft’s clear dedication towards regaining its once sovereign market position in office softwares. In the words of John Case, a corporate vice president for Microsoft Office, “It’s becoming clearer to us, to continue to be the best paid solution, it’s also important to be the best free solution.”