Foxconn International Holdings Ltd is a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s largest maker of electronic components. It supplies famous brands such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft. 300,000 to 450,000 workers are employed at the Longhua Science & Technology Park, a cramped and walled campus referred to as “Foxconn City” in Shenzhen, China. Workers live, work and eat inside the complex and from January to November 2010, 16 Foxconn workers have committed suicide.

Some of the key problems in the Foxconn factories are the lack of freedom and interaction between the employees, the military-style enforcement, and an excessive amount of security around the factory.The low salaries and harsh punishments for faults committed by workers have greatly reduced employee motivation and ultimately, their motivation for life. The suicides at Foxconn were essentially caused by Foxconn’s weak and dysfunctional organizational culture and company structure. I believe that in order to restore stability and to prevent further suicides within the company, Foxconn needs to rebuild its organizational culture and to remodel its leadership style to be more employee-oriented. To rebuild trust, Foxconn’s leaders should formally apologize for the company’s unethical decisions in the past and promise positive organizational change for the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn

http://www.cultofmac.com/report-another-foxconn-death-this-time-on-ipod-line/54098

http://www.logichp.com/tag/foxconn/

I have been volunteering at 3H Craftworks Society on 4th Ave.  and  only recently have I come to realize that it is a social entrepreneurship firm! Its crafts are created by artisans with disabilities. Craftworks hire adults in Vancouver who are unable find regular employment due to physical challenges or mental illness. As volunteers, we cut out pieces of felts and prepare materials to be  sent off to the employees, who often work on the crafts in the convenience of their homes. The finished crafts will be sent back to the Craftworks store on 4th Ave., where the crafts are displayed and sold. The profit generated by the sales are used to pay the disabled employees and the program manager.

Craftworks is an excellent example of social entrepreneurship because it is not simply driven by the perception of a social need or by its compassion. Rather, Craftworks have a vision of how to achieve improvement through innovative means. It has developed a new model of operations with the social mission to empower the disabled in Vancouver. Personally, I see  Craftworks as a social enterprise that generates social returns far greater than its financial ones.

Employee Testimonial: “The work provides satisfaction knowing that many children have found pleasure in the things I produce” – 65-year-old male employee (stroke victim).

Further Employee Testimonials:

http://www.3hcraftworks.com/site/clients.shtml

Vidcon 2010: What Is YouTube’s Future?

Early 2005, three bachelors in their 20’s were hanging out and chatting about a party they’d gone to the night before. They took some video footage at the party and hoped to share it with friends but didn’t know how to get it online. With their simple concept of online video-sharing, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim founded Youtube with an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital in November 2005. Youtube is a perfect example of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s definition of entrepreneurship: new products, new production methods, new markets, and new forms of organization. Although online videos existed before Youtube, there has never been a huge video-sharing site like Youtube taken to the international stage. Videos on Youtube can be uploaded and watched by anyone at anytime. Thus, Youtube’s market is basically anyone who has access internet. Youtube is also characterized by its innovation, amount and speed of wealth creation. On October 9th, 2006, Google acquired YouTube for a $1.65 billion deal. Currently in the year 2010, the Google-owned  YouTube has collected a revenue of 450 million dollars, as reported by The New York Times. Youtube is THE entrepreneurial company that is earning bountiful profits fast.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/worklife/successstories/ebusinessprofiles/article168764.html

Definition of Entrepreneurship:

http://www.quickmba.com/entre/definition/

Rogers has recently experienced a 24% drop in its third-quarter profit.  Smaller wireless telecommunications providers such as Wind, Mobilicity, and Public are stealing the market with their flexible and cheap monthly phone plans. Rogers, threatened by the new competing companies, in particular Wind Mobile, launched a new unlimited talk and text brand Chatr in late July 2010.

Trouble for Chatr

After Chatr was introduced, Wind and Mobilicity resorted to Ries & Trout’s positioning tip: reposition the competitor. Wind and Mobilicity realized that it had to act before Chatr works the “product ladders” in consumers’ minds and achieve top parity with them. Chatr offers plans that are remarkably similar to Wind and Mobilicity so they  recently filed complaints, claiming that Chatr is a ” fighting brand”, which is “introduced by a market incumbent that undercuts a smaller player”. Fighting brands are illegal under the Competition Act. Suspicions are that once the smaller firms, in this case, Wind and Mobilicity, are driven out of business, Rogers will ditch Chatr and raise the prices.

Chatr needs to reassure the public of its position as  a brand because as a Chatr customer myself, I am becoming skeptical of the brand and how long it will last.

http://www.financialpost.com/Wind+Mobile+tilts+Rogers+over+Chatr/3606653/story.html
http://www.financialpost.com/Wind+Mobile+tilts+Rogers+over+Chatr/3606653/story.html#ixzz14ntRnvmr

Like Lululemon, Aritzia has received high demand for its products, including its three distinct product lines: Talula Babaton, Talula, and TNA, which account for 70 per cent of the inventory in the stores. It keeps its inventory replenished through its efficient management information system, which explains its success in terms of store revenues.

Aritzia cleverly targets a broad age demographic: females aged 14 to 30. Market research suggested that women at this age range, before marriage, would spend more on buying clothing and on following the latest fashion trends. Aritzia is a very well-positioned company because it did not target only the tween market but the older teens. Its garments and accessories suit the taste of females aged 14 to 30 because 14 year old girls like to dress more maturely and women in their 20s like to dress down and appear more youthful. Aritzia has thoroughly researched the market for women’s fashion and catered to a target market that is enormously profitable.

Aritzia’s fundamental advantages in terms of operations also contribute to its success. It can’t be “undercut by the department store down the aisle or another store in the mall” because Aritizia controls its store policies, which includes the merchandise as well as the markdowns.

http://www.retaileducation.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=72&Itemid=61

http://nbc5streetteam.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/an-inside-look-at-aritzia/