Business Development

Once again, your role is the VP for an electric vehicle company you have previously described. You have just left the CEO’s office and have shared with her your plan for taking the next step in developing a business culture that is more innovative and driven by an entrepreneurial spirit. Your CEO is excited about your ideas and wants to begin to see the fruits of your labors come to fruition.

To that end, you are planning a meeting with key team members with two purposes in mind. You are hoping to be able to use the meeting time to stimulate some thoughts around new innovations or opportunities to grow. Secondly, you are hoping that you can begin to formatively share with the team some strategies for becoming more consistent in putting forth innovations with an entrepreneurial spirit.

For this assignment you are to prepare an essay wherein you explain specifically what you intend to do at this meeting in identifying some new innovation opportunities and clarifying the structure. To be specific, your response should include the three following components:

Component 1: Strategies for available opportunities and gap analysis: Pursuant to the reading, this is the process of identifying unmet needs in the market or with specific clients you are serving. This step of the process is not about creating new ideas. It is about identifying what needs are out there which a new idea or innovation may be able to respond to. Be specific and relate strategies discussed in the book and articulate how you would utilize them in this meeting context.
Component 2: Identification process and opportunity assessment: In the next section describe the specific steps you would take as to how you would elicit some new ideas from the team pursuant to the gaps or opportunities observed in section 1. Also, what steps would you take to assess the opportunity to identify within this process? Be specific and relate strategies discussed in the book and articulate how you would utilize them in this meeting context.
Component 3: Role Identification: When it comes to innovation, Hoque (2014) describes specifically some various roles that teammates can play in relationship to the innovation process. Simply put, this author suggests that to promote innovation and entrepreneurship, you don’t necessarily have to all play the same role. There are various roles that can be played within the process that can lead to successful innovation. For this component of the assignment, identify the steps you would take to help team members identify roles that are needed on the team and would be helpful to the overarching process. How would you help team members choose a role that they are comfortable with while simultaneously making sure that the work is done effectively?