Business Strategies for new Products

Forouzan Golshani
Dean College of Engineering
California State University – Long Beach

Abstract
In today’s fast-changing business environment, intelligent companies must constantly innovate and adapt their strategies in order to remain competitive. Often businesses – even large ones – fail because of a lack of strategy, and the competitive landscape has numerous examples of well-known firms whose revenues, profits and stocks rose for decades until they imploded.
This seminar focuses on “strategy” as the single most important factor in the success of a venture. A strategy (not a strategic plan) is the smallest set of choices and preferred options that is sufficient for everyone in the organization to make decisions. Although creating winning strategies is important to any organization, it is even more important for ventures with new products. We will present a simple model that works with product cost, product selling price, supplier’s margin and buyer’s margin, and identifies key concepts and players for maximizing the returned value. Under his model, profit margin, which is ordinarily defined as price minus cost, will also include supplier’s margin and buyer’s margin. Strategy setting in such a model will lead to coordination of calculated relationships among all members of the value net, including the innovator, the suppliers, the customers, the complementors, the substitutes and the competitors.
We will illustrate by means of several case studies the importance strategy selection, and its impact on business’s overall success, future innovation, process optimization and product improvement.

This seminar is suited for engineering and business majors and innovators who are interested in entrepreneurship and the development of businesses that will take inventions to market.

n.a.