Spotify

Final Exam

MIS5801 – Flanagan

Please email your team’s response to me (ryflanag@temple.edu) by the end of the exam period.  Your teams response should be limited to 8 pages using this document and font, not including your business model canvas. Be sure to list all of your team members below:

There are four questions. Each question is worth 25 points.

1. Analyze one (only one!) of the following firms:

1. Uber                         (www.uber.com)
2. Innocentive                (www.innocentive.com)
3. Spotify                 (www.spotify.com)

Provide a short response to each of the questions below about your selected firm.

• Do a Business Model Canvas of the company
• Place the value proposition within the context of the overall disruptive innovation theory. What kind of disruption does the main product or service provided by the firm bring? Why?  
• Identify and analyze the competitive challenges that may face the selected product or service as well as how the company might respond to those challenges.

Spotify:

• Do a Business Model Canvas of the company

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• Place the value proposition within the context of the overall disruptive innovation theory. What kind of disruption does the main product or service provided by the firm bring? Why?  

The company has grown to become the largest provider of music in the world. Its market success is based on a new model of music playback with a new proposal: free legal music.

This business has been successful despite the high barriers to entry: the rights of music that are complex and expensive, also touched face habits of consumers who downloaded music or even still bought records

• Identify and analyze the competitive challenges that may face the selected product or service as well as how the company might respond to those challenges.

At the moment Spotify carries good momentum from its original disruptive invention but it will have to continue to innovate both internally and through wise partnerships in order to stay competitive and safeguard its own future. “This ultimately means that in doing what they must do, every company prepares the way for its own disruption. This is the innovator's dilemma. That being said, if Spotify can maneuver its internal innovation engine and partners to enhance the music experience for fans, paying subscribers and revenue generating partners will continue to be interested.

The labels have integrated the music and production. They’ve always outsourced the distribution. First to radio, then MTV, then Spotify. Spotify’s only integrated distribution. The music and production of it are all modular and feed from the labels. To fully integrate, Spotify would effectively have to become a record label.

1. Assume you are a junior partner at Accenture (a consulting firm) responsible for their Life Sciences (pharmaceutical) Consulting Practice globally.  Accenture has decided to launch a new IT initiative on knowledge management.

• Identify the benefits you would expect to receive from this initiative. List and justify each benefit.

1. Build knowledge:  the experience obtained in the process of consultancies is an important source of knowledge for the next consultants that will work in a project in a similar sector or a similar situation. The analysis based on data could underestimate some aspects that make that the final result won’t be as good as expected. The experience having applied the initial plans will give some important “lessons” that are useful for improving the analyses or for finding practical paths to obtain better results. Having the experiences documented, organized and available is the form to build knowledge in a company.

1. Save training costs: In our opinion when young consultants are hired, they usually don’t have experience as well as information enough in certain areas. Having the information in a system that allows it easily to consult will save the time of the new consultants to find previous cases that Accenture has already done, where they can find information, sources of information, prior analysis and results of the consultancy. This also will reduce the time that the senior consultants will spend in explaining the new partner about of the experiences that they have in areas of their specialty. With previous information and own research, the questions to the senior consultants will be more focused and their time will be used more efficiently. The senior and junior consultants could be more efficient, as well as the expenses will be smaller.

1. Higher revenues: Higher revenues from the implementation of projects in less time.

• Identify the potential obstacles to implementing this initiative. List and explain each obstacle.

1. Communication: An important part of the process of implementing a system of knowledge management is the communication of the advantages of it. People will not find it useful if they don’t know all its capabilities. One useful tactic is to run a pilot prior the general implementation. In this process, all consultants can see the possibilities of the system and give some recommendations that could be included. Different tactics of communication will encourage the users to get familiarized with the tool and learn the different alternatives it brings.

1. Resistance to change: Usually the people in the companies have the knowledge, based in his experience and are not used to systematically capture it and place it in a document. This can be seen as more work to do, as an extra task to do. In other sense, many people feel that they are secure in their jobs when they have a knowledge that nobody does. This means, they will be considering as necessary, so they will have a secure job in the time. This people might be the most resistant, because they will feel that their advantage will be gone and they could be easily replaced.

• How would you make the case that this is in the financial best interest for the organization? How do the benefits ultimately affect the organization’s “bottom line?”

the knowledge is the most important value in consulting firms, with each job it will increase in favor of the company.  One of most important skills in the business model of a consulting firm is the overall knowledge and the agility to learn in a short time.