Planning Process for Innovation

Each weekly written assignment provides content for required sections of your Final Assignment. As noted in the Final Paper Guidelines, your business should remain consistent throughout the course.
For this assignment, write a three to four-page paper that addresses the following points:

Evaluation of the Firm – McGrath’s and MacMillion’s Twelve Factors of Evaluating Firm

Evaluate your organization, being sure to address six of the twelve McGrath’s and MacMillion’s Twelve Factors:

Demand for the Product
Factors that could speed adoption
Factors that could block success of an Innovation
Likelihood of Strong Competitive Response
Likelihood that the Potential Competitive Advantage is Sustainable
Ability to Create Standards
Cost Factors in Commercialization
Resources Available for Commercialization
Level of novelty of the innovation
Cost considerations in development
Other opportunities that could be leveraged
Potential area where damage might occur

Remember, in addition to technical factors, other factors that could block success of an innovation include legal, ethical, security, diversity, and social responsibility issues of the organization.

Apply the McFarlan & McKenney Strategic Grid Planning Process

The McFarlan & McKenney Strategic Grid Planning Process analyzes the organization’s readiness to implement innovation strategy. McFarlan and McKenney, in 1983, devised a very useful grid for assessing a company’s strategic use of IT (Carboy, 2007).
The grid has four quadrants built around two straight forward questions:

How important does management feel the current IT systems are to the company?
How important does the company think future developments in IT will be required to sustain and enhance its way of doing business (Carboy, 2007)?

Source Image: https://techcommunity.softwareag.com/techniques-blog/-/blogs/410027
Definitions of each quadrant are:

Quadrant 1 – Support: Low Current: Low Future Impact. IT has little relevance and simply supports existing processes.
Quadrant 2 – Turnaround: Low Current: High Future Impact. IT will feature more on the business agenda in the future. The company believes that IT will have a major impact on their business model in the future and IT is in a turnaround role i.e. IT will be a key feature of future strategic planning.
Quadrant 3 – Factory: High Current: Low Future Impact. IT is important in terms of day-to-day operations but it is not felt that there are any major IT developments on the horizon that will fundamentally alter the nature of the business. Here, the key issue is the maintenance of existing systems (Factory Role).
Quadrant 4 – Strategic: High Current: High Future Impact. In this quadrant, IT plays a crucial role both in terms of its current role and in terms of how future IT developments are viewed as impacting on the organization. IT is mission critical.

Use your chosen organization for this exercise. Based on your research of the organization’s use of technology and moving forward technology plans, identify which quadrant most appropriately applies to your organization’s readiness to implement innovation strategy (Carboy, 2007).

Identify the McFarlan & McKenney Strategic Grid quadrant that applies best to your organization: Low Current: Low, Future Impact; Low Current: High Future Impact; High Current: Low Future Impact; and High Current: High Future Impact.
Gen-ED > Provide supporting research to justify your analysis conclusion.
Identify 3 examples of your organization’s innovation directions to substantiate your points.

The Planning Process for Innovation assignment

Must be four double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..
Must include a separate title page with the following:

Title of paper
Student’s name
Course name and number
Instructor’s name
Date submitted

Must use at least three scholarly sources in addition to the course text.

The Scholarly, Peer Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. table offers additional guidance on appropriate source types. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate for this assignment, please contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source for a particular assignment.

Must document all sources in APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center.
Must include a separate references page that is formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center.