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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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Essay Doctorate
Strategic Direction of Apple in the Enterprise
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has emerged as one of the most profitable and prolific companies in the world, generating a market capitalization rate of $623B as of this writing in late August, 2012, delivering $148B in Revenues in their latest fiscal year and $40B in Net Income (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). One of Apple's greatest strengths is its ability to quickly translate innovative product concepts and designs into state-of-the-art products that deliver exceptional customer experiences. Apple has honed this through decades of disciplined execution and a continual focus on creating a highly synchronized supply chain, highly collaborative product design and development workflows, and the ability to take concepts to completed products in a fraction of the time of their competitors (Murray, Goode, Muro, 2010). Apple is credited with creating the smartphone market, tablet PC, cloud-based music buying and delivery service (iTunes), centralized document and image storage (iCloud) and more innovations in operating systems in the last five years than Microsoft (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). All of these accomplishments taken together have led to Apple creating a catalyst of growth in the tablet PC market, fueling a 100%+ increase in iPad sales (13% year over year) and iPhone sales that have increased 152% over the last eighteen months as well (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). Apple continues to accelerate the sales of their iPad, iPhone, iTouch devices in addition to its mainstream laptops and systems. Apple is able to accomplish these significant results by concentrating on the execution of its value chain, a decades-only concept that Dr. Michael Porter originally created to illustrate how the functional departments of a company all must be synchronized to deliver profitability (Porter, 2008). Apple's value chain is exceptionally effective in managing the coordinating of supply chain, sourcing, quality management, production, product design, marketing services, logistics and retailing operations. As long as two decades ago Apple had been concentrating on how to create this level of synchronization across their entire enterprise (Larson, 1994). As the business model of Apple has continually become more complex, the ability of the organization to stay agile and quick to respond has increasingly become more difficult. This is a common problem companies have as they grow in size and complexity of their business models. For Apple, the environmental factors in the areas of economic, social, technological and political change have challenged their ability to grow, and also forced them to create a more market-driven organizational structure, abandoning the highly successful product divisions of the 1990s and early 2000 timeframe (Apple Investor Relations, 2012). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate how Apple is managing to continually grow despite economic, social, technological and political environmental forces impacting their business. In addition, an analysis of their market environment, response to the turbulent economic environment they operate in, the nature of their product strategies, an assessment of their strategic direction and strategic options are all included in this analysis. A separate section is included for each of these areas throughout the analysis. The Porter Fives Forces Model is used for analyzing these market dynamics (Porter, 2008).
Essay Doctorate
Amazon Kindle Fire vs. Apple iPad: Market Analysis
The Amazon Kindle Fire, introduced September 28, 2011 is actually going to expand the total available market for e-readers and tablet devices including the Apple iPad. Rather than the two competing, both will form a…
Research Paper Undergraduate
Organizational Analysis Profile - Starbucks
The political, economic, and social realities facing Starbucks are not nearly as influential as in many other businesses, at least at first glance. They are a coffee house, so it would seem they have little impact in…
Paper Undergraduate
Strategic marketing concepts and best practices
Compass began a new era when they merged with Granada. That transaction heralded several years of restructuring, from which Compass is just now emerging. The period of 2001-2005 was essentially defined by this…
Paper Undergraduate
American Auto Industry Crisis: GM, Chrysler, and Ford Analysis
The American automotive industry is facing a public relations crisis, given the recent bankruptcy of two of its major cornerstones, General Motors and Chrysler, and the near-failure of the third, the Ford Motor Company.
Paper Doctorate
Transportation Planning and the Role
Transportation Planning and the Role of Public Warehouses
Paper Undergraduate
Coca-Cola's Accounting Method for Its Investment in CCE
How does the Coca Cola Company account for its investment in coca cola enterprise, Inc. (CCE)? What are the accounting implications of the method Coca-Cola uses?
Essay Doctorate
Marriott HRM and Business Strategy the Marriott
This paper gives a brief overview of a HRM strategy for the Marriott chain of hotels and resorts. The Marriott must maintain the highest quality standards in the industry. To do so they should employ a TQM strategy to ensure constant quality improvement. This also allows them to employer their employees so that they can handle customer demands more efficiently.
Essay Doctorate
Hyundai Card's marketing strategy case analysis
Hyundaicard's Marketing Strategy: Case Study
Paper Doctorate
Facebook's negative impacts on legal outcomes, privacy, and employment opportunities
This paper is about the risks associated with having a Facebook account. Some of the risk categories discussed are privacy risk because Facebook's security is so porous; risk that comes from employers who want to get access to your account; and also the risk that if you ever are suspected of a crime information will be used against you.