Case Study Description of Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A)
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania were interested in whether exposure to light early in life might affect eye growth and lead to an increased risk of myopia (nearsightedness). Eyes grew rapidly after birth, but myopia usually did not develop until later in life and arose from excessive postnatal eye growth. They knew that the duration of daily light had been shown to increase eye growth in chicks and wondered whether the same might be true for humans. The results startled researchers and might explain the increase in myopia rates over the last two centuries. The B case gives the results of a follow-on study conducted by the Ohio State University.
Swot Analysis of "Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A)" written by Phillip E. Pfeifer, Karla Zadnik includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Myopia Nearsightedness facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, and Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) casestudy better are - – challanges to central banks by blockchain based private currencies, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, increasing commodity prices, geopolitical disruptions, talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs,
increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A)
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Myopia Nearsightedness, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Myopia Nearsightedness operates in.
According to Harvard Business Review, 75% of the managers use SWOT analysis for various purposes such as – evaluating current scenario, strategic planning, new venture feasibility, personal growth goals, new market entry, Go To market strategies, portfolio management and strategic trade-off assessment, organizational restructuring, etc.
SWOT Objectives / Importance of SWOT Analysis and SWOT Matrix
SWOT analysis of Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Myopia Nearsightedness
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Innovation & Entrepreneurship field.
4. Making a Innovation & Entrepreneurship topic specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Myopia Nearsightedness
Strengths Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Myopia Nearsightedness in Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) Harvard Business Review case study are -
Diverse revenue streams
– Myopia Nearsightedness is present in almost all the verticals within the industry. This has provided firm in Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) case study a diverse revenue stream that has helped it to survive disruptions such as global pandemic in Covid-19, financial disruption of 2008, and supply chain disruption of 2021.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Myopia Nearsightedness has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive segment. Secondly the value chain collaborators of the firm in Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) HBR case study have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Training and development
– Myopia Nearsightedness has one of the best training and development program in the industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) Harvard Business Review case study by analyzing – employees retention, in-house promotion, loyalty, new venture initiation, lack of conflict, and high level of both employees and customer engagement.
Strong track record of project management
– Myopia Nearsightedness is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Ability to lead change in Innovation & Entrepreneurship field
– Myopia Nearsightedness is one of the leading players in its industry. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in its segment but also across the whole industry. The ability to lead change has enabled Myopia Nearsightedness in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Myopia Nearsightedness are driving operational speed, building greater agility, and keeping the organization nimble to compete with new competitors. It helps are organization to ideate new ideas, and execute them swiftly in the marketplace.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Myopia Nearsightedness has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in, as mentioned in case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) - staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Learning organization
- Myopia Nearsightedness is a learning organization. It has inculcated three key characters of learning organization in its processes and operations – exploration, creativity, and expansiveness. The work place at Myopia Nearsightedness is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders in Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) Harvard Business Review case study emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Organizational Resilience of Myopia Nearsightedness
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing that Myopia Nearsightedness does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Myopia Nearsightedness has built up over years in its products and services combo offer has resulted in high retention of customers, lower marketing costs, and greater ability of the firm to focus on its customers.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy in the Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) Harvard Business Review case study comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the industry, building diversified operations across different geographies so that disruption in one part of the world doesn’t impact the overall performance of the firm, and integrating the various business operations and processes through its digital transformation drive.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Myopia Nearsightedness in the sector have low bargaining power. Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Myopia Nearsightedness to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Weaknesses Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) are -
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of Myopia Nearsightedness, firm in the HBR case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative, highlighted in the case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A), in the dynamic environment Myopia Nearsightedness has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Myopia Nearsightedness has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
Skills based hiring
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Myopia Nearsightedness has created an environment where the organization is dominated by functional specialists rather than management generalist. This has resulted into product oriented approach rather than marketing oriented approach or consumers oriented approach.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Myopia Nearsightedness has not been able to do capital spending to the tune of the competition. This has resulted into fewer innovations and company facing stiff competition from both existing competitors and new entrants who are disrupting the industry using digital technology.
Aligning sales with marketing
– It come across in the case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) that the firm needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department in the case Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Myopia Nearsightedness is planning to shift buying processes online.
Interest costs
– Compare to the competition, Myopia Nearsightedness has borrowed money from the capital market at higher rates. It needs to restructure the interest payment and costs so that it can compete better and improve profitability.
High cash cycle compare to competitors
Myopia Nearsightedness has a high cash cycle compare to other players in the industry. It needs to shorten the cash cycle by 12% to be more competitive in the marketplace, reduce inventory costs, and be more profitable.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee as mentioned in the HBR case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A), is just above the industry average. Myopia Nearsightedness needs to redesign the compensation structure and incentives to increase the revenue per employees. Some of the steps that it can take are – hiring more specialists on project basis, etc.
No frontier risks strategy
– After analyzing the HBR case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A), it seems that company is thinking about the frontier risks that can impact Innovation & Entrepreneurship strategy. But it has very little resources allocation to manage the risks emerging from events such as natural disasters, climate change, melting of permafrost, tacking the rise of artificial intelligence, opportunities and threats emerging from commercialization of space etc.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Myopia Nearsightedness has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the industry over the last five years. Myopia Nearsightedness even though has strong showing on digital transformation primary two stages, it has struggled to capitalize the power of digital transformation in marketing efforts and new venture efforts.
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, firm in the HBR case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) has high operating costs in the. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Myopia Nearsightedness 's lucrative customers.
Opportunities Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities highlighted in the Harvard Business Review case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) are -
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Myopia Nearsightedness to conduct training and development for its employees across the world. This will result in not only reducing the cost of training but also help employees in different part of the world to integrate with the headquarter work culture, ethos, and standards.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Myopia Nearsightedness can leverage digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the production process, customer analytics to get better insights into consumer behavior, realtime digital dashboards to get better sales tracking, logistics and transportation, product tracking, etc.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Myopia Nearsightedness to expand its talent hiring zone. According to McKinsey Global Institute, 20% of the high end workforce in fields such as finance, information technology, can continously work from remote local post Covid-19. This presents a really great opportunity for Myopia Nearsightedness to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Myopia Nearsightedness in the consumer business. Now Myopia Nearsightedness can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Myopia Nearsightedness in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship segment, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Myopia Nearsightedness can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Myopia Nearsightedness is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) case study suggests that firm can utilize new technology to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Myopia Nearsightedness can make experimentation a productive activity and build a culture of innovation using approaches such as – mining transaction data, A/B testing of websites and selling platforms, engaging potential customers over various needs, and building on small ideas in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship segment.
Developing new processes and practices
– Myopia Nearsightedness can develop new processes and procedures in Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry using technology such as automation using artificial intelligence, real time transportation and products tracking, 3D modeling for concept development and new products pilot testing etc.
Loyalty marketing
– Myopia Nearsightedness has focused on building a highly responsive customer relationship management platform. This platform is built on in-house data and driven by analytics and artificial intelligence. The customer analytics can help the organization to fine tune its loyalty marketing efforts, increase the wallet share of the organization, reduce wastage on mainstream advertising spending, build better pricing strategies using personalization, etc.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Myopia Nearsightedness can build a diversified supply chain model across various countries in - South East Asia, India, and other parts of the world. This reconfiguration of global supply chain can help, as suggested in case study, Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A), to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Myopia Nearsightedness has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in the industry. This can help Myopia Nearsightedness to build a more holistic ecosystem as suggested in the Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) case study. Myopia Nearsightedness can build new products and services such as - data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Reconfiguring business model
– The expansion of digital payment system, the bringing down of international transactions costs using Bitcoin and other blockchain based currencies, etc can help Myopia Nearsightedness to reconfigure its entire business model. For example it can used blockchain based technologies to reduce piracy of its products in the big markets such as China. Secondly it can use the popularity of e-commerce in various developing markets to build a Direct to Customer business model rather than the current Channel Heavy distribution network.
Threats Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) are -
Aging population
– As the populations of most advanced economies are aging, it will lead to high social security costs, higher savings among population, and lower demand for goods and services in the economy. The household savings in US, France, UK, Germany, and Japan are growing faster than predicted because of uncertainty caused by pandemic.
Capital market disruption
– During the Covid-19, Dow Jones has touched record high. The valuations of a number of companies are way beyond their existing business model potential. This can lead to capital market correction which can put a number of suppliers, collaborators, value chain partners in great financial difficulty. It will directly impact the business of Myopia Nearsightedness.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Myopia Nearsightedness can face downward pressure on margins from increasing competition from international players. The international players have stable revenue in their home market and can use those resources to penetrate prominent markets illustrated in HBR case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) .
Consumer confidence and its impact on Myopia Nearsightedness demand
– There is a high probability of declining consumer confidence, given – high inflammation rate, rise of gig economy, lower job stability, increasing cost of living, higher interest rates, and aging demography. All the factors contribute to people saving higher rate of their income, resulting in lower consumer demand in the industry and other sectors.
Environmental challenges
– Myopia Nearsightedness needs to have a robust strategy against the disruptions arising from climate change and energy requirements. EU has identified it as key priority area and spending 30% of its 880 billion Euros European post Covid-19 recovery funds on green technology. Myopia Nearsightedness can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Innovation & Entrepreneurship field will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Myopia Nearsightedness can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Myopia Nearsightedness in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry. The Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry is already at various protected from local competition in China, with the rise of trade war the protection levels may go up. This presents a clear threat of current business model in Chinese market.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, as highlighted in case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A), Myopia Nearsightedness may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Innovation & Entrepreneurship .
Increasing wage structure of Myopia Nearsightedness
– Post Covid-19 there is a sharp increase in the wages especially in the jobs that require interaction with people. The increasing wages can put downward pressure on the margins of Myopia Nearsightedness.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Myopia Nearsightedness has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Myopia Nearsightedness needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship sector. According to Mckinsey study top managers believe that the adoption of technology in operations, communications is 20-25 times faster than what they planned in the beginning of 2019.
High level of anxiety and lack of motivation
– the Great Resignation in United States is the sign of broader dissatisfaction among the workforce in United States. Myopia Nearsightedness needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Myopia Nearsightedness high dependence on third party suppliers can disrupt its processes and delivery mechanism. For example -the current troubles of car makers because of chip shortage is because the chip companies started producing chips for electronic companies rather than car manufacturers.
Instability in the European markets
– European Union markets are facing three big challenges post Covid – expanded balance sheets, Brexit related business disruption, and aggressive Russia looking to distract the existing security mechanism. Myopia Nearsightedness will face different problems in different parts of Europe. For example it will face inflationary pressures in UK, France, and Germany, balance sheet expansion and demand challenges in Southern European countries, and geopolitical instability in the Eastern Europe.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers in the HBR case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) needs to zero down on the relative importance of each factor mentioned in the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants.
We can provide the relative importance to each factor by assigning relative weights. Weighted SWOT analysis process is a three stage process –
First stage for doing weighted SWOT analysis of the case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) is to rank the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. This will help you to assess the most important strengths and weaknesses of the firm and which one of the strengths and weaknesses mentioned in the initial lists are marginal and can be left out.
Second stage for conducting weighted SWOT analysis of the Harvard case study Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) is to give probabilities to the external strategic factors thus better understanding the opportunities and threats arising out of macro environment changes and developments.
Third stage of constructing weighted SWOT analysis of Night-Lights and Nearsightedness (A) is to provide strategic recommendations includes – joining likelihood of external strategic factors such as opportunities and threats to the internal strategic factors – strengths and weaknesses. You should start with external factors as they will provide the direction of the overall industry. Secondly by joining probabilities with internal strategic factors can help the company not only strategic fit but also the most probably strategic trade-off that Myopia Nearsightedness needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.