The U.S. companies are falling behind on innovation comparing to other companies. However, they still have a clear and desperate goal, which is to create more than $250 billion in new revenue. There are more than one solution to solve this.

First of all, make innovation part of the job. Employees are requested to bring up new ideas in certain time limit. It means in this case, the company are paying the employees to come up with ideas. Either think, or being laid off. However, this will not work very well because workers are not willing to this, which will lead to lots of bad ideas. Another way to increase innovation is to encourage workers with better chance of promotion or more working benefits.

Thirdly, when workers cannot innovate, cutting cost can be a helpful way. Obviously, cutting cost can also bring more profit to the company as innovation does. This can be achieved easily through some small changes to the company such as cutting off advertisement cost when there are stable customers.

http://www.cioinsight.com/it-management/innovation/slideshows/u.s.-companies-falling-behind-on-innovation.html/

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/innovative-sustainable-business-models

http://www.seec.schulich.yorku.ca/ContentResources/LibraryFiles/innovations.jpg

There are many benefits of outsourcing including less production cost and being more focus on key activities. However, as seen in the Sears example, outsourcing is seemingly bringing some bad influences as well.

Sears laid off 245 workers because it planned on outsourcing and focus more on its core retail business. Outsourcing can effectively improve the status of company and helps bringing profits for the company but this act is not so thoughtful to the local workers. The demand for local workers shrinks as more companies are outsourcing. Other than leaving number of workers under unemployment, the employees will also be demoralised as they do not have a guaranteed job. It makes the workers less productive and decrease the working efficiency.

On the other hand, companies use less money to hire the outsourcing workers but those workers are sometimes unqualified for the job. Those outsourcing workers apply the job with fake qualifications that match the requirement of the company. In the meantime, they are not monitored by the managerial class. The only outcome is the decrease in productivity.

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7152.html

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/08/20/sears-canada-layoffs-india/

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/insiders-say-canada-scammed-by-foreign-worker-industry-1.1358803

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/1996/December/outsourcing.asp

As discussed  in class, people prefer “decentralized” structure. However, I prefer “centralized” structure more due to the few reasons stated below.

First of all, centralized structure provides motivation for employees to work harder. Also, In the centralized structure, the top management class earns much more than the top management class in the decentralized class as the profits are distributed to smaller management class in a centralized company. Employees have the intention to work harder to get promoted.

Secondly, working process can be more efficient. Each class in the company is under a higher class. In most of the time, people have to listen to orders. They cannot really provide opinions and choose not to follow instructions. Therefore, the whole progress will be efficient as orders are delivered from class to class without questions.

Thirdly, people working in a centralized company has a more stable job status. Each class is comparatively smaller than the class in a decentralized company. It means fewer people are responsible for the job in each class. This makes the job less replaceable and it leads to a smaller chance for a company to lay off the employees in each level of the hierarchy.

Online resources such as twitter, instagram and facebook, are used for advertising by many big companies. This is a great new way to make the brand well-known to people around the world in the fastest speed. This is a way to achieve such a big while beneficial effect because internet is used by the mass public. Most importantly, this is a free service! What else can be better than free advertisements for your company? As we can all see in the daily lives, people are mostly using social networking applications that can be downloaded to your phone when they have free time. This phenomena is especially obvious in UBC as free internet coverage is placed all over the campus. This shows the importance of how internet is influencing our lives nowadays. If network system suddenly breaks down one day that can never be repaired, all advertisements have to go back to the old generation system, the whole business industry will slow down and may get even worse than the old generations as we already lost the old business techniques that our previous generations used to have. We are not only using social network, we are now relying on it.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/16-examples-of-huge-brands-using-twitter-for-business/

http://press.emerson.edu/imc/files/2011/12/social-network.jpg