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Business Model
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A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value — defining the relationship between a company, its customers, and the market it operates in. Business courses across management, strategy, entrepreneurship, and organizational development regularly ask students to examine business models because they sit at the intersection of planning, operations, and competitive positioning. The topic is academically interesting precisely because no single framework applies universally; models must account for the specific services a company provides, the customers it targets, and the broader market conditions it faces.

The papers archived on this topic approach business models from several distinct angles. Case-study analysis is common, with papers examining specific organizations — including Skype, Telstra, and Redbox — to evaluate how their models perform under real conditions. Other papers take a strategic lens, linking business model design to human resources, finance, and organizational change. Some focus on emerging technologies such as RFID and cloud computing to explore how innovation forces companies to rethink service delivery and management structures. Still others address sector-specific challenges, such as attracting and retaining teachers or assessing the productivity of teleworking arrangements.

A strong essay on this topic begins with a clearly scoped thesis that connects a company's model to a specific outcome — growth, failure, competitive advantage, or adaptation. Evidence drawn from operational data, market behavior, and organizational structure tends to carry the most weight. One common pitfall is treating a business model as a static snapshot; strong essays account for how models evolve in response to changing customer needs, market pressures, and internal management decisions.

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Paper Doctorate
Talent management program success at Bank of America
The modern day working environment is a highly complex and intricate field, in which employees and employers have to continually meet new demands, standards and challenges. Employees, for instance, have to perform new tasks at superior standards, or they have to continually develop their skills. At the level of the employers, they have to respond to challenges such as increasing roles of employees, increasing competition for talented staffs or changing structures of the workplace, especially due to diversity (Bond, 2007).
Paper Undergraduate
Toyota SWOT Analysis Organizational Analysis
Toyota Motor Corporation is one of the largest and most diversified auto manufacturers globally today, with supply chains and production systems that span across over 70 nations with sourcing, procurement and quality management systems unified to their manufacturing centers. The high level of complexity inherent in these operations have made it essential for Toyota to create one of the most advanced supply chain management systems globally, the Toyota Production System (TPS) (Dyer, Nobeoka, 2000). This system is the galvanizing force of their entire operations and is so complete in its coverage of supply chain operations, it takes approximately one year to get suppliers up to speed and to the point of meeting quality standards on it (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). The TPS is a foundational element of the mission and mission of Toyota as well. As is stated in the company's annual reports and on the investor relations area of their website their mission is "To attract and attain customers with high-valued products and services and the most satisfying ownership experience worldwide and in key markets including America " (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012),. To attain these high levels of customer satisfaction, all aspects of the Toyota business model must be synchronized to deliver the greatest levels of reliability possible at the lowest costs. The vision statement of Toyota as also defined in their financial statements is "To be the most successful and respected car company worldwide and in key markets including America" (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). Despite the recalls that occurred in the 2010 and 2011 timeframe, Toyota continues to reinvest in and continually look for how they can best improve worldwide Total Quality Management (TQM) performance, taking into account House of Quality, Lean Six Sigma and quality functional management initiatives, all aimed at increasing the reliability of their vehicles by driving up the quality levels of suppliers (Takahashi, 2010). Toyota launched an extensive internal audit of their own to determine the factors surrounding the recalls and learned that specific factories had taken shortcuts and at one point had not performed supplier audits of incoming components in well over two months (Minhyung, 2010). Internally Toyota had lost sight of its core values of product quality within the plants that had been the catalyst of the faulty products being produced that led to the globally embarrassing vehicle recalls (Johar, Birk, Einwiller, 2010). Toyota is a very resilient, very analytically-driven culture and took the lapse in quality as a major challenge to improve. This became the catalyst of a renewed emphasis on quality and an even more stringent level of supplier quality management processes, procedures and systems (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of Toyota Motor Company. The strengths and weaknesses will be analyzed from the internal environmental perspective, and the opportunities and threats from the external environment standpoint. Of the most potentially debilitating factors the company is facing today, product recalls and product quality could have a very detrimental effect on the value of the brand over time, a factor Toyota mentions in their quarterly filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). As Toyota is a very analytically-driven organization that has a strong engineering emphasis, their filings with the SEC also indicate their greatest potential growth is ahead of them with their intensive spending on research and development (R&D) in hybrid and hydrogen vehicles (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). Presented below is an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Toyota followed by an assessment of their opportunities and threats.
Paper Undergraduate
Daiwa House Agri Cube and The Farmery comparison
This paper is a business plan for the Farmery, which is a container based retail outlet that grows its own food in the containers. The plan includes product description, market analysis, demographics, marketing strategy, competition analysis, company organization, advertising plan, philosophy, personnel policies, training, manufacturing plan and financial pro formas.
Paper Undergraduate
Importance of the Alcan Case
Alcan's continued revenue growth is the result of the combined success of increasing sales in four main business units, in addition to growth through acquisition. The cumulative effects of these two factors have served to create a profitable business and one where a highly decentralized organizational structure dominates (Chang, Wang, 2011). The catalyst of the organization becoming so decentralized is the continued revenue gains made across four businesses, each competing in market areas that face heavy pricing and commodity-like market conditions. Despite the heavily process-centric based approaches the industry takes to supply chain management, production and distribution, Alcan has been also able to profitably grow sales in the more mature markets they compete in. The senior management and IT departments credit the highly decentralized nature of the enterprise-wide systems that run the company. During the time period of the case, Alcan generated $23.6B in sales in 2006, and has 68,000 employees throughout its global operations that span 61 countries. The four major groups include Primary Metal, Engineered Products, Packaging and Bauxite & Alumina. Each of these business groups have their own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and IT infrastructure. They each also have their own maintenance contracts with enterprise software vendors including SAP who the company pays approximately $100M a year in maintenance fees to. There are also the costs of operating over 400 different pricing systems, many of which duplicate functions across divisions as well. The new CIO of the company, Robert Ouellette, enters into a challenging situation and one that will require a completely different IT and organizational structure to succeed. Organizational Environment The Alcan organizational environment is highly decentralized to the point of there being four separate companies in the same corporation, each with its own entire value chain and supporting functions. As with the value chain concept, each of the four divisions has created its own main and supporting functions, and no two business units or divisions are the same. From the initial supply chain management and supplier quality management processes and systems to the supplier qualification, new product development, production and fulfillment including logistics, each business unit is significantly different than the other. When information systems and processes become unique to a given organizational business unit or division, the information and intelligence shared redefines the identity and over time, the core competencies of a business unit (Boh, Yellin, 2007). This is exactly what's happening in the four business units of Alcan during the time period of the case study. The Primary Metal, Engineered Products, Packaging and Bauxite & Alumina have in effect become their own companies, each with its own ERP, Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and myriad of pricing and distribution systems. The case states that there are over 400 different pricing systems in place across the four business units or divisions. CIO Robert Ouellette and other senior executives see the potential for consolidating all systems together and creating a centralized IT architecture. Creating a highly centralized IT architecture and framework would require the fundamental structure of the company to change significantly. It would also require an entirely new IT architecture, followed by redefinition of processes, systems and procedures throughout the company. As the information platforms or technologies of a business define not only the performance of divisions but the structure and performance of business models over time, Robert Ouellette and his staff must think strategically as to how they will modify the overall organizational structure.
Paper Undergraduate
Strategic Management Comparing Balanced Scorecards
Of the many strategic challenges organizations have, one of the most challenging to create a culture of continued accomplishment, supporting by processes, systems and procedures that support continued growth. The two books, Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, and Organizations Buzz with Energy and Others Don't (Gratton, 2007) and Balanced Scorecard Step-by-Step: Maximizing Performance and Maintaining Results (Niven, 2002) each take a comparable approach to defining how best organizations can define and sustain high performance and over time create a culture of high achievement. The intent of this analysis is to first provide a synopsis of each book, then define a association of both text, followed by an analysis and evaluation. Both books are predicated on a high level of cooperative, highly collaborative performance, with Gratton's book looking more to how best to combine cooperative mindsets, boundary spanning authority and ownership, and an igniting purpose, all supported by productive capacity (2007). The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as define by Niven (2002) is predicated on financial projections of past performance indicating the probability of success for future initiatives. The Niven book is one of the best written on BSC, as it provides a well-defined methodology that has enough flexibility to allow for taxonomies to be created and supported in the context of multidivisional businesses (Niven, 2002). Ideally strategists need to consider each and combine their relative strengths for each situation an organization is facing over time. Both ideally need to be included in the development of a strategic framework over time.
Research Paper Doctorate
Corporate Philanthropy on the Developjment
¶ … Corporate Philanthropy on the Developjment of Business
Research Paper Doctorate
E-Business Central to Any Market
Central to any market transaction, whether in a geographical or virtual location, is the exchange of information. In a market economy, prices signal information about transactions between consumers and producers and…
Research Paper Doctorate
Arrow Electronics Internet Distribution Strategy: Case Study
¶ … future marketing issues facing Arrow Electronics, Inc. And possible answers and probable outcomes of the choices that need to be made. We pride ourselves on giving our customers the best value for their money.
Research Paper Doctorate
Perdue Farms case study
Perdue Farms' tryst with the poultry industry started way back in 1940s when its business was limited to selling eggs. However, it was soon to realize that future profits lay in selling chickens which has ample scope…
Research Paper Doctorate
E-business model fundamentals and applications
Websites and eBusiness Models: A Comparison of Three Organizations