Business Strategy Assignment: Influence Of Innovation Towards Apple’s Success

Question

Assessment Tasks: You are required to write a 2000 word innovation strategy report to the board of your selected organisation. Your innovation strategy report must:

1. Succinctly introduce the selected organisation and selected innovation trend
2. Succinctly define the following concepts and their relationships: the organisational environment, innovation trend, innovation strategy, innovation capabilities, innovation value creation and capture.
3. Succinctly describe how the creation of an innovation strategy ensures strategic alignment within organisations and why it is important.
4. Analyse the impact of the selected innovation trend on the selected organisation. You should apply at least one strategy tool to analyse the impact, opportunities and threats to the organisation.
5. Recommend how the organisation’s innovation strategy best responds to the innovation trend by answering the following questions.
   • How should the organisation organise its innovation activities?
   • What additional innovation capabilities should the organisation develop?
   • What innovation initiatives should it pursue?
   • How should the organisation ensure that it creates and captures value from the innovation?
6. Recommend how the organisation best ensures strategic alignment to address the innovation trend.

Answer

Executive Summary
This business strategy assignment investigates the innovation and its influence towards brand success. Innovation is the procedure of transforming an unconventional business ideas into unique engagements that influences business prosperity and growth. Considering the latest innovation trends, the report highlights the attributes and concepts of innovation strategies and its implication within Apple Company.

Introduction
The main aim of this assignment on business strategy is to enhance better form of innovation strategy required in organizations. In this case, Apple Company has been taken into consideration with the robotic automation as major form of innovation strategy. The main purpose of this report is to deliver better form of relationship regarding organizational environment, innovation trends, and innovation strategy and innovation capabilities. The suitable form of creation helps to ensure strategic form of alignment in the Apple Company.

The business strategy assignment investigates innovation and its robotic automation and influence towards increase the productivity level. There is a necessity to recommend regarding Apple innovation strategy that helps to enhance high form of productivity (Zemmour, Kurtser & Edan, 2017).

Discussion
1. Introduce selected organization and trends
The business strategy assignment focuses on Apple Inc as the concerned organisational entity in order to introduce the innovation strategy of the organisation. Apple Inc is an American multinational technology enterprise headquartered in California (Apple, 2018). The company designs, develops and sells online services, computer software and the different consumer electronics.

In terms of innovation trends, the robotics automation can be selected that is able to provide competitive advantage to the organisation. It is the application that enables the employees of the company to interpret existing applications for the sake of processing transaction, manipulating data and communicating with digital system.

2. Define concepts and relationship
Innovation strategy within the organisational context is associated with organisational environment, the company’s innovation capabilities and the value creation. In this context, the definition and the relationship of each of the components (such as organisational environment, innovation trends, capabilities and others) associated with innovation can be provided.

Organisational environment : Organisational environment is composed of different components and forces that influence the performance, operation and resources of the business enterprise. It includes different elements that exist outside and inside the organisation and have, potential impact on the entire of business practices (Pisano, 2015). In terms of the concerned organisation Apple, the government regulatory agencies, legal framework, suppliers, the needs and requirements of the customers belong to the components that influence the business practices of Apple in the electronic device market.

Innovation trend: The needs and preferences of the customers are changing and in this changing business environment, it is essential for the business enterprise to tend towards innovation trend that belongs to new method or thing as per the customers’ needs and requirements. Thus, innovation trend is all about the introduction of new methods, ideas and things. As for instance, the business strategy assignment reviews Apples tend to introduce new innovation that is robotic automation in order to enhance the customer base and dominate the electronic market as well.

Innovation strategy: The plan made by the organisational entity to encourage advancements in technology by investing in the research and developmental activities can be referred to as the innovation strategy. As for instance, the use of technology and new management system by Apple can be referred to as the innovation strategy.

Innovation capabilities: Organisational entity needs to comprise some of the abilities so that, it can be possible for the organisation to align the workforce as per the new requirements and introduce resources that will be required to bring the innovation from concept to reality (Jajja et al. 2017). Such kind of abilities can be referred as to the innovation capabilities.

Innovation value creation and capture: Innovation value capture can be referred to as the process that helps to retain some percentage of value provided in the entire transaction of the organisation. On the other hand, the creation of the value can be referred to as the generation of value for the potential customers that help to sell products and services.

Relationship: From the above business strategy assignment discussion, it can therefore be stated that the organisational environment is entirely related with the innovation capabilities and strategies. Without considering the organisational environment and capabilities, the concerned organisation Apple cannot be able to introduce new product or service in the market. Further, it can be stated that the organisation needs to understand the new trends and preferences of market and customer to introduce new methods or services. Thereby, it can be stated that the organisational environment, innovation trends and capabilities are interrelated.

3. Describe creation of innovation strategy ensure strategic alignment within firm and importance
Initiatives of Innovation within the Apple are driven by their innovation strategy that requires a strategic alignment. Thus, the chosen organization has adopted innovative trend as their innovation strategy and that trend is “Robot Automation (Tilley, 2017). It is due to that today, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) refers to that technology of choices for streamlining the business operations and for reducing the costs, thus, in the context of Apple, their strategy for the implication of RPA is to streamline their business operations in order to lead the market of the electronic devices manufacturer. Analysing the strategic alignment of Apple, it is seen that they realised the kind of the success on this business strategy assignment and that needs to adopt sesverl best practices for fulfilling the requirements demanded by the implication of the RA (robotic Automation), which Apple Company have learned from the developments of RPA.

The steps are such as they have used the tools from the leading vendors for finding the executive sponsor, which are intuitive enough, thus, the business users having the appropriate training have also used them without actually calling over IT. This Company then appointed a Chief Officer of RPA, where they have created the new including senior position for taking the responsibility for the enterprise-wide rollouts based on the technology (Lacity, Willcocks & Craig, 2015). The Apple management then has trained their trainers, their employees and everyone associated with the innovative trends. This company continually keeps the development, testing the experiments including producing the environments separate, where they use the SDLC (Systems Development Life Cycle). The Company needs to align the strategy innovation with their strategic alignment in order to creating a separate environment for developing and testing the applications. However, it is critical to Apple’s success regarding the transformation initiative is that every member through their organization has fully aligned with the goals aligned with this innovation.

4. Impacts selected innovation trends on selected firms
The robotic automation process provides suitable form of innovation trends that helps the staff members in the organization of Apple (electronic device manufacture) to develop configuration in computer software to carry out entire operation successfully. There is a necessity to focus on new innovation trends that helps to enhance high form of productivity. The robotic automation process helps to increase the productivity level in the organization with the suitable form of techniques. The robotic automation helps to implement new form of technology to accomplish the entire business process easily (Pangarkar, 2018). The major trends that needs to be introduced by Apple Company lies with the strategic innovation plan that helps to ensure better form of innovation that provides high form of strategic imperative. The strategic form of planning can be implemented through robotic form of innovations to carry out the entire operations successfully. Automated process provides high form of remote management in the electronic device manufacture Apple Company. The strategic plan helps to enhance better form of innovation that provides strategic imperatives.

One strategic tool that is carried out through SWOT analysis, which are followed as:

1. Strength: Robotic innovations help to increase the productivity level by reducing the efforts of human. The new form of technology can be introduced through it, which provides high form of services or products delivered among the customers across the world.
2. Weakness: The weakness lies in robotic innovations includes with the use of skilled labour that can able to accomplish entire working phenomena. There is a necessity of high form of investments to introduce this strategic innovation (Cundy et al. 2014).
3. Opportunity: The new innovative trends can be followed through robotic innovation process that helps to grab the attention of maximum number of customers across the world. The new products or service can be introduced through it.
4. Threats: The excessive use of technology might cause huge stake of problems among the human beings. It might environmental hazards.

5. Recommend organization innovation strategy
The business strategy assignment recommends the best strategic engagement by Apple in implementing the Robotic Process Automation, it is integral to comprehend the meaning of the same. RPA is a smart software that is capable of emulating the user behavior and thereby interacts with process transactions and applications. Off late RPA has been realised and recognised as one of the ultra modern innovations that are creating technological stir in developing an effective business output. Of course the indulgence of “robots” in conducting organisational functions is certainly innovative in the most surprising manner. Hence it can be recommended for Apple to engage RPA for conducting its technical tasks.

It is prescribed for Apple developers to code the business processes into the RPA software and leave it for further speculation. Further the effective functioning can be done by engaging the robots in process, business dealings, transactions and even maneuver the system data including screen scraping and digital recognition. This will certainly enhance the qualitative output of Apple by significantly impacting and supporting high need IT workflow. One of the most innovative steps undertaken by Apple in regards to RPA innovation is the manufacturing of Liam robots that are capable of dismantling the IPhone 6 for recycling. Hence it can be recommended for Apple to implement this innovation in further recycling of mobile phones and other electronic gadgets to recover from ecological imbalance. It can be further advised to Apple to use RPA in customer oriented activities as well as internal business processes too. An instance of this revolution can be the classification of incoming emails whereby robots can be a significant game changer.

6. Recommend on organization best strategy alignment to address innovation trends
For addressing the innovation trends, the Apple Company needs to have some sort of the objective framework to prioritise that the business processes get automated, along with in the same order. Business departments of Apple needs to desire for deploying the RA as innovation trend, which needs to be required for presenting their cases over the business effects regarding the proposed automation that will help the leaders of RPA for prioritizing the automations including scheduling the automation initiatives within the disciplined manner. Apple also needs to talk continuously to their business users for making sure that the processes have further been automated within the right manner.

They have two ways for erring with their innovation trend that is they can automate the good business processes properly, which can result in numerous errors, or they can competently automate the bad business processes. Thus, they need to make sure that the underlying the business process needs to be efficient including not holding this enterprise back due to the residual inefficiencies from their last legacy has been the ways of doing the things (Maloney, Bujtor & Miehm, 2014). Hence, the latter further requires more accurate error logging; along with making sure, that there has been an issue the right applicant are usually not notified including a fix needs to be put immediately into the appropriate place. Moreover, before implicating the innovation trend, it is required for Apple for educating their employees through the companies, along with explaining to the employees that what their innovation trend that is Robotic Automation can along with cannot do.

Conclusion
The above discussion offers a synopsis of the concept of innovation and its staggering impact on organisations in the modern era. Business organisations depend on innovative strategies to optimise business growth to a larger extent. In fact the commercial sector has been occupied majorly by the innovative business thoughts driving away the stereotyped business concepts. This report was underpinned with the aim of highlighting the innovative trend of RPA , popularly known as the robotic process automation and its future implications in regards to Apple company. The latter part of the business strategy assignment depicts few recommendations suggested for Apple company to utilize the RPA in the most effective manner.

References
Apple. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.apple.com/

Cundy, T. P., Marcus, H. J., Hughes-Hallett, A., Najmaldin, A. S., Yang, G. Z., & Darzi, A. (2014). International attitudes of early adopters to current and future robotic technologies in pediatric surgery. Journal of pediatric surgery, 49(10), 1522-1526.

Wilson, T. V., & Fenlon, W. (2007). How the iPhone works, How to delete notes on iphone Retrieved from: on Apr, 24(2018).

Cundy, T. P., Marcus, H. J., Hughes-Hallett, A., Najmaldin, A. S., Yang, G. Z., & Darzi, A. (2014). International attitudes of early adopters to current and future robotic technologies in pediatric surgery. Journal of pediatric surgery, 49(10), 1522-1526.

Lacity, M., Willcocks, L. P., & Craig, A. (2015). Robotic process automation at Telefonica O2.

Maloney, M. A., Bujtor, H. E., & Miehm, B. K. (2014). U.S. Patent No. 8,747,188. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Pangarkar, N. (2018). The formula for successful innovation at SAS: Integrating internal and external knowledge. Global Business and Organizational Excellence, 37(2), 24-31. Pisano, G. P. (2015). You need an innovation strategy. Harvard Business Review, 93(6), 44-54.

Wilson TV, Fenlon W. How the iPhone works. Retrieved from: on Apr. 2007, how to recover deleted notes on iphone

Tilley, J. (2017). Automation, robotics, and the factory of the future. McKinsey Quarterly Zemmour, E., Kurtser, P., & Edan, Y. (2017, April). Dynamic thresholding algorithm for robotic apple detection. In Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC), 2017 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 240-246). IEEE.