Organizational Structure And Culture

• Evaluate creative and innovative organizational structures
• Recommend alternative innovations to solve an internal or market need
• Implement creative and innovative processes within an organization

Scenario

You work as a middle manager for one of the top U.S. producers of luxury and mass-market automobiles and trucks.

The chief technology officer (CTO) of the company from the course scenario has been watching new technology developments that the company could integrate into its vehicles to enhance the usefulness of and access to the data acquired by the many digital sensors that have been integrated into vehicle subsystems over the past 20–30 years. The technology trend of particular interest is the internet of things (IoT)—the interconnection of embedded devices, such as sensors and computers, over the internet. By taking advantage of this trend, the CTO believes the company can seize an opportunity to provide better service and predictive maintenance to its customers, improving customer satisfaction and adding additional revenue streams.

Based on briefings by the CTO, senior management has decided to implement IoT in its product line. Your CTO has asked you to lead a cross-functional team to take this initiative forward. Your first task is to make a recommendation for how the company should approach this business problem. Do you recommend using incremental or discontinuous (that is, slow or fast) innovation? Specifically:

Should the company…

1. Design a completely new product line, based on the new technology (discontinuous innovation)

or

1. Add new technology features into one model and then incrementally into the broader product line (incremental innovation)

The recommendation you and your team make is an important first step in pursuing this new technology.

In Milestone One, you and your team defined what that innovation looked like: would it be disruptive (new product line) or incremental (new features in one existing product)?

In Milestone Two, you developed a strategy plan and a high-level business model. You’ve shared these with various stakeholders, and they are in agreement with your assessment of how best to get to market with this IoT innovation, which will allow the company to be competitive.

Now, the CTO has asked you to come up with a proposed organizational structure that will support the innovation implementation. In this way, you will be assisting in making the innovation sustainable for the company from the course scenario. Companies that are innovative must make sure they have structured the organization in a way that supports innovation, and a key component of innovation is keeping track of what their customers want in terms of products and services.