1. Read Articles "Deep Change" and "Services revolution". It should help you with the task below.
2. Pick two companies competing in the same industry (e.g., retail stores, auto companies, catalog sales, hospitals, banks, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) and compare their operating strategies (similarity and differences) along categories listed below. Feel free to use tabular format.

Company A
Company B
Cost

Quality:
-top quality
-consistency

Time:
-delivery speed
-on time deliveries
-development speed

Flexibility:
-customization
-variety
-volume flexibility

3. PRODUCT DESIGN STRATEGY MINI CASE

This case is aimed for you to explore the tradeoffs shown in my notes "Product Design" on the last page. Each arrow represents a tradeoff between each pair of factors influencing performance of the new product introduction projects. For example, if a company tries to develop a higher quality product (high product performance), it might take longer to develop, thus development time will be sacrificed and visa verse: if development time is shortened, most likely quality must be sacrificed (top horizontal double arrow). The case below asks you to evaluate several alternatives revolving around different circumstances (quality varies, time changes, development time changes). Question d) is where you are expected to put everything you have done in a), b), and c) together. Creative Technology (CT) has just pioneered a high-performance disk drive for engineering workstations. The market for this product is highly lucrative because very few companies have the technology to develop a competing product. Storage Technology (ST) has the needed design expertise and has decided to enter the market to compete with Creative Technology. After careful screening of different new product ideas, Storage Technology finds the following three product design options attractive:

Option
Development
Cycle Time
(months)
Product Performance Rating