An experiment was recently conducted in the Indian city of Bengaluru to study whether formal skills training provided to low wage earners provides benefits to the company. The pilot training was provided by Personal Advancement and Career Advancement (PACE) a corporate training programme developed by Gap. It was realized that there was a seven percentage points’ increase in productivity post this training among these employees. About sixty thousand workers in twelve countries have been trained by the PACE methodology, with nearly half of them in India. The Indian government plans to train about ten million people on life skills such as entrepreneurship, soft skills, financial and digital literacy so such a procedure could help. This programme has also contributed to Gap’s target of a million plus outreach for women and adolescent girls by year 2020.

Source:https://hbr.org/2017/07/an-experiment-in-india-shows-how-much-companies-have-to-gain-by-investing-in-their-employees?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=dailyalert&referral=00563&spMailingID=17730018&spUserID=OTY0OTMwNTk5NwS2&spJobID=1061906882&spReportId=MTA2MTkwNjg4MgS2

Uploaded Date:31 July 2017

Globally it is estimated that more than a trillion and a half US dollars was spent on marketing annually in 2014, with the figure set to top the two trillion figure by the year 2019. While this clearly is a huge figure, not all of it is used up correctly. Thus the concept of Marketing Return on Investment (MROI) must be used up. It helps in several ways such as in justifying marketing spend and deciding on the heads to spend on. It provides business analytics to compare on trends against competitors. MROI also helps companies in being accountable to the tasks they were set such as handling customers and sales. MROI can be calculated using the formula where the cost of the marketing investment gets deducted from the incremental financial value gained as a result of the marketing investment and the resultant figure is divided by the same cost of the marketing investment. There are some challenges though, notably in social media induced digital marketing where the returns sound good when only measured against the tech investment but comes down substantially when the personnel costs get added up. A common fallacy meanwhile with MROI is that only incremental sales margins are given preference as opposed to long-term gains from marketing efforts.

Source:https://hbr.org/2017/07/a-refresher-on-marketing-roi?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

Uploaded Date:28 July 2017

A bias has set in among people that organizational transformation is bound to fail. People are afraid of change and this has resulted in a sort of pessimism with a belief on high failure rates. Business consulting giant McKinsey conducted a research to ascertain this problem. Organizations were surveyed and it was found out that less than forty percent of respondents confirmed success in the change. While this sound akin to majority failing, the same survey also mentioned that a third of respondents claimed to be somewhat successful. Only a tenth voted in favour of the change efforts being complete failures. So while change is hard, it isn’t impossible and in fact most efforts in the long run when pursued authentically tend to succeed rather than fail.

Source:https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-using-the-excuse-organizational-change-is-hard?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=dailyalert&referral=00563&spMailingID=17688012&spUserID=OTY0OTMwNTk5NwS2&spJobID=1061437157&spReportId=MTA2MTQzNzE1NwS2

Uploaded Date:28 July 2017

A new concept has emerged where the company’s value is gauged not by conventional financial metrics but by its customer behaviour. This is much easier to track on subscription based business models, but most businesses aren’t such. Rather, they are based on occasional purchases. Identifying the right data at the opportune moment is the challenge. Six metrics have been identified for this. They are active users, heavy active users, forward repeat rate, customer retention rate, new users and frequency. No single metric will provide the solutions, but business analytics will need to be performed on the whole host of data. Moving from two to three metrices, hardly had much incremental value add as pieces were still missing. Doubts still exist on the competitiveness of this scale, but corporates have already started buying into this model.

Source:http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/customer-behavior-and-company-value/

Uploaded Date:14 July 2017

Even for companies that have otherwise fulfilled all market or customer expectations, certain platform based challenges always remain. Platforms are those that deliver the value. Twelve standard forms of value delivery have been identified. Those twelve are product, service, subscription, resale, lease, agency, loan, option, insurance, capital, audience aggregation and shared resource. In order to best perform digital marketing, it is always advisable to use a combination of several platforms. One company that has cracked this code is Omni. They are very particular about storage of products. Another unique factor about them is their photography ability and leveraging of such aesthetic sense.

Source:http://customerthink.com/customer-value-expanding-across-the-12-standard-forms-of-value/

Uploaded Date:14 July 2017

Traditionally business was dominated by the pipeline form of companies. These were linear in operation, but now upstaged by the platform kind of businesses such as Uber, Airbnb and Amazon. The platform revolution allows businesses access to ecosystems of talent, information and technology. Platforms are ecosystems of talent because matches are created between vendors and firms. Activities such as monitoring and evaluation, management training, framing algorithms or certifications in crucial skill areas are not ones where full time staff is needed, but expert outsiders can make a killing. It is also an ecosystem of technology for it connects disparate technologies to combine within a single suite. Where single companies cannot solve all problems, a combination provides at lower average costs. They also provide tremendous business intelligence as enormous amount of data gets generated to be further used up by marketers for decision making. Companies are even leveraging on their data generated to earn revenues and bring additional benefits to customers.

Source:http://innovationexcellence.com/blog/2017/06/16/platforms-are-eating-the-world/

Uploaded Date:28/06/2017

In the context of sustainable development and environmental protection, a number of companies are rightly thinking about the concept of planned obsolescence that has been in vogue ever since the Great Depression. This system allows the creation of products to be replaced after a certain time period, by substitutes. The manufacturer does not think of post usage as it would harm its own business. This has seen a lot of companies actually provide cheaper versions which last for the least amount of time possible before replacements are sought. A long based firm Agency of Design (AoD) has tried to break free from this vicious cycle by creating two models- Optimist and Pragmatic. In the former, the idea is to include emotional tags on seemingly mundane devices so people could celebrate their birthdays and the immense value they provided. This would allow graceful ageing and reduced wastage. Philips has started a system where instead of selling light bulbs, they will lease light as third party managers, thus reducing goods’ accumulation. The other systemic business innovation thought of is pragmatic where instead of replacing whole products, redundant parts need to get replaced. This modular approach has been successfully implemented by financial solutions provider DLL. A system of disassembly is also being put in place where products’ use could be changed after it has run out of its primary function.

Source:http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/designing-circular-economy/

Uploaded Date:27/06/2017