Yiting Chen's Blog

The article “In a crowded market, entrepreneur finds a sweet way to stand out”

discussed about how Arc Initiative helps Ms. Tesfaye with her business’s development. It is good to see the business school students are using what they learned in classes to help the people in need. And this makes me wonder, what if the United Nations was fully funded? Will the problems still occur?

If United Nation is fully funded, a lot of things will probably be easier. Poor people will have enough resources for living, and their will be probably be less conflicts and wars…

But, is it possible for United Nation to help everyone in the world? People in different culture and social backgrounds are dealing with very different problems: education, health and so on. If United Nations wants to deal with everything, it needs to have huge amount of fund and a lot of people to work for it, which is almost impossible.

Frankly speaking, neither United Nation nor Social Enterprise should be the one to be responsible for the social problems happening nowadays. Scarcity of resources and social inequality will always exist, what we can do is to trying to help the poor people to get out of their situation. Therefore, it is good that some successful entrepreneurs are taking actions to help poor people and becoming social entrepreneurs.

In an attempt to make a smaller amount of loss, Sony is considering reconstruct it’s business strategy. In the past few years, Sony keeps trying to become the world’s third largest smartphone maker in the market. But it ended up making huge losses. So what’s wrong with Sony’s phones?

The smartphone market is now dominated by Samsung and Apple. Apple builds up a unique brand image which helps it gain a lot of loyal customers. And when people have the brand loyalty, it would be difficult to change their preference and taste.

Also, Sony is somehow too eager to gain more market share. It launches dozens of phone models each year with very similar functions, whereas Apple only launches 2 models each year, but they are highly differentiated.

Therefore, Sony is now reconsidering its business strategy and changing its main focus to image sensor and game consoles. Now Sony’s Play Station 4 trounced Xbox One of Microsoft Corp. It is a great opportunity for Sony, as game market is highly profitable, it would generate huge amount of profit for the company. If Sony can grab this chance and dominate in this market, it will help Sony with its brand image. But at the same time, it requires Sony to spend huge amount of money on developing new games.

Sources: http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/2014/10/31/leaner-sony-gains-smartphone-lift-despite-its-own-mobile-malaise

US military has recently been hugely affected by global warming. It’s day- to- day military training and activities are troubled by flood, and electricity shortage, they are now spending huge amount of money on detecting the potential environmental threats and making changes to the previous training method.

For US military to maintain a sustainable development, it would be better if it adapts triple bottom line framework. It takes into account 3 performances: social, environmental, and economic. Sustainability will only be achieved when all three performances are beyond expectations. But now, global warming is bringing in a lot of troubles and it has severe impact on military’s budgeting decisions.

The problem can never be solved by only reallocate the bases, cut down on outdoor training exercises or adapt to hotter temperature. It would probably help in the short run, but in the long run, all kinds of new problems will keep occurring, the only way to solve it is to reduce global warming effect and maintain a sustainable growth. It is not only the government’s responsibility. Military can help by having less gas waste or pollution.

Sources: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/13/pentagon-global-warming-will-change-how-us-military-trains-and-goes-to-war

The massive hydroelectric project recently started by the government is strongly opposed by First Nation. According to the federal-provincial panel, the project will benefit the growing demand for electricity and can also generate clean hydroelectric for oil, gas and mining industries. As the panel said “B.C. will need new energy and new capacity at some point”. This project is beneficial to everyone in Canada and it will also help Canadian economy.

However, the external costs caused by it should also be evaluated, especially when there’s already some conflicts between B.C government and First Nation. The dam will destroy the farmland, flood the valley and destroy their fishing industry. It would be bad for the government’s reputation and people’s opposition may cause the project to halt. At that time, it will cause even more problems and conflicts.

Therefore, it would be better if the government reevaluate the costs and benefits of the project and probably make some modification to the existing design, for example, decrease the farmland using. The chiefs of First Nation said they will support smaller projects which have less adverse effect to their normal life.

On September 24th, 2014, Blackberry launched it’s new smart phone “passport“. It combines the touching screen and its featured keyboard together. It is targeting at business people but the price is much more affordable than the new Iphone6.

Blackberry was once very popular in America, it is secure, easy to send and receive emails, and most importantly, its unique keyboard. However, as Apple and Samsung are launching more cellphones with touching screens, Blackberry starts to become obsolete. People nowadays prefer to smartphones like Iphone since it has lots of fancy functions, and more apps than old business phones.

The launching of “Passport” means a lot for Blackberry. It tried to adapt to the latest trend without giving up its unique selling point. It provides business people with a more professional smart phone.

However, according to customers’ reports, this new combination is not that ideal. Its squared touching screen seems to be the right size for reading articles and emails, but it is pretty hard to watch videos on it. And it’s keyboard is somehow too small for typing.

In general, “Passport” is just the start for Blackberry to enter smart phone market. After reviewing feedbacks from customers, it can hopefully develop a more widely accepted phone to compete with Apple and Samsung.

The article Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything  states an innovative way for businesses which just start up to make an efficient plan. It breaks the traditional idea of spending weeks on building a perfect plan before the business starts functioning. It’s main purpose is to avoid making products that really meets customers’ desire. Before the actual production start, business builds a model and asks for potential customers’ opinions. Then it assemble some samples, ask for people’s opinion again, and modify its products by people’s feedback.

Compare to the traditional planning method, lean start-up is more realistic, instead of make up targets and forecasts, it encourages businesses to gather customers’ feedbacks, keep improving the products ,and adapt their original ideas to customers demand.

However, Lean Start-Up methodology only provides a very broad idea about the business itself, it doesn’t involve any specific statistics about the future profit trends and cost forecasts. It will probably be hard for the business to attract investors, as the main reason why investors invest is to get money. If they cannot get information about the company’s future financial performance, they may not be interested in this investment.

In conclusion, Lean Start-Up provide businesses an opportunity to build a plan with lower failure rate. But businesses still need to do extra evaluation for future profits and costs.

This article is mainly about the social responsibility a business has to take. For a business to operate successfully, it should not only care about profit, but also needs to promote what the society desires. For example, as a profit maximizing business, it may seek to increase the products’ price, however, as a part of the society, it’s job is to help prevent inflation. It’s a very common problem that companies might be facing. In order to gain more profit and invest more into the business, companies may only think about their own benefits like using cheaper but not environmental-friendly materials. But is that actually benefiting the company? When potential customers know that your products are not environmental-friendly and you have still set a high price for it, they are probably not going to buy it, as they might think your company is not being responsible for your business activities. Therefore your company will have a bad brand image and reputation. Although you seems to have saved money and made more profit in the short term, but in the long run, less people will going to buy your products, the sales will fall, and the company will make less profit.