by Business infrastructure
A business infrastructure plan creates a road map that is used to start and run a company. This road map consists of a three part plan: daily operations, processes, and employees. Each component of the business infrastructure should be created and analyzed independently of the others. The plan should act as a stand-alone resource for the way the business is to grow and progress well into the future.
Provides:
- A solid foundation.
- A replicable platform.
- A model and a formula that makes each time you do something easier than the time before.
- Consistency in your delivery of customer value.
- Economies of scale.
Collaborator Networks
A collaborative network is a network consisting of a variety of entities (e.g. organizations and people) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment, culture, social capital and goals, but that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals, and whose interactions are supported by computer networks. The discipline of collaborative networks focuses on the structure, behavior, and evolving dynamics of networks of autonomous entities that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals. There are several manifestations of collaborative networks, e.g.:
- Virtual enterprise (VE).
- Virtual Organization (VO).
- Dynamic Virtual Organization.
- Extended Enterprise.
- VO Breeding environment (VBE).
- Professional virtual community (PVC).
- Business Ecosystem.
- Virtual manufacturing network
Human capital
Human capital is a concept used by human resource professionals to designate personal attributes considered useful in the production process. It encompasses employee knowledge, skills, know-how, good health, and education, to name a few. Companies can invest in human capital, for example, through education and training, enabling improved levels of quality and production.
The term human capital refers to the economic value of a worker’s experience and skills. Human capital includes assets like education, training, intelligence, skills, health, and other things employers value such as loyalty and punctuality. As such, it is an intangible asset or quality that isn’t (and can’t be) listed on a company’s balance sheet. Human capital is perceived to increase productivity and thus profitability. The more investment a company makes in its employees, the chances of its productivity and success becomes higher.
Intellectual property
Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The most well-known types are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term “intellectual property” began to be used in the 19th century, though it was not until the late 20th century that intellectual property became commonplace in the majority of the world’s legal systems.
The main purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to the information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. This gives economic incentive for their creation, because it allows people to benefit from the information and intellectual goods they create, and allows them to protect their ideas and prevent copying. These economic incentives are expected to stimulate innovation and contribute to the technological progress of countries, which depends on the extent of protection granted to innovators.
The intangible nature of intellectual property presents difficulties when compared with traditional property like land or goods. Unlike traditional property, intellectual property is “Indivisible“, since an unlimited number of people can “Consume” an intellectual good without it being depleted. Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from problems of appropriation: a landowner can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, but a producer of information or literature can usually do very little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price. Balancing rights so that they are strong enough to encourage the creation of intellectual goods but not so strong that they prevent the goods’ wide use is the primary focus of modern intellectual property law.
Strong Brands
A brand is strong when it condenses the peak performances of a company and makes them tangible over a long period of time, and credibly presents its uniqueness at all brand touchpoints. For instance, BMW conveys “Joy (of Driving)” in every interaction whether in the car itself, on the web site, or in the company’s own BMW museum.
Strong brands have clear brand core values, an unequivocal positioning, and a long-term brand strategy. Consistent brand management with the help of brand rules ensures that the brand strategy is consistently applied in operative business. This helps to prevent a brand from overstepping its credibility limits.
A brand strategy always has a content component and a style component that both have to be implemented so that the brand can always be clearly recognized by its brand messages and its brand style. In short: Strong brands give consumers a clear image of the brand and what it stands for.
Strong brands are therefore desirable and highly attractive. This has diverse positive effects on corporate success:
- The customer’s price sensitivity is substantially lower, so the brand strength is reflected in profitability and profit margin.
- They attract the right employees and ensure that the company has an excellent position in the crucial fight for the best talent.
- They are beacons for all relevant decisions. In ever more complex market environments, they provide logical orientation.
Benefit:
- Better customer recognition
- Higher customer loyalty
- More word of mouth
- Higher employee motivation
- Higher advertising effectiveness
- Higher applicant quality
- Lower price sensitivity
Established Customer base
The customer base is the group of customers who repeatedly purchase the goods or services of a business. These customers are a main source of revenue for a company. The customer base may be considered the business’s target market, where customer behaviors are well understood through market research or past experience. Relying on a customer base can make growth and innovation difficult.
Companies with a customer base consisting mainly of large companies may increase their customer base by pursuing small and mid-size companies.
As companies grow their customer base, and gain experience satisfying them, their customers grow accustomed to that business accomplishing a certain task for them. The company or product’s brand name may even correlate with the task the customer uses it for. Xerox, Kleenex, and Band-Aid are some extreme cases of brand-names being used as the generic name of the product itself. In fact, as long as customers are continually satisfied with their purchases, the act of going to that company’s brand to accomplish a specific task becomes habitual.
Repeat buyers and users are also useful for further reasons, as they are the source of “word of mouth” advertising. Studies have shown that customer satisfaction with a brand leads to more purchases, from both the same and new customers. A satisfied customer expresses their enjoyment in the product, or even shows a friend the product and has them try it out, and a dissatisfied customer may speak against a product or not mention it at all. Of course, the core consumer is the main spreader of the company’s brand name, and the more they use and like what they consume, the more those that surround them will gain interest and then potentially become customers themselves.
Synergistic offerings
The term synergistic is derived from synergy, which refers to the benefit that results from the merger of two agents who want to achieve something that neither of them would be able to achieve on their own. The term is mostly used in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), where two companies merge to form one company that can generate more revenues or streamline the two companies’ operations and save on costs.
Marketing synergy
Marketing synergy refers to the marketing benefits that two parties in an M&A transaction may enjoy when promoting their products and services. These synergies include information campaigns, marketing tools, research and development, as well as marketing personnel.
Revenue synergy
When two companies merge, they often become synergistic by virtue of generating more revenues than the two independent companies could produce on their own. The merged company may gain access to more products and services to sell through an extensive distribution network.
Access to Scarce resources and Capital
The resources that we value time, money, labour, Tools, Land, and Raw materials exist in limited supply. There are simply never enough resources to meet all our needs and desires. This condition is known as scarcity.
Scarcity refers to a basic economics problem the gap between limited resources and theoretically limitless wants. This situation requires people to make decisions about how to allocate resources efficiently, in order to satisfy basic needs and as many additional wants as possible. Any resource that has a non-zero cost to consume is scarce to some degree, but what matters in practice is relative scarcity. Scarcity is also referred to as “paucity.”
Natural resources can fall outside the realm of scarcity for two reasons. Anything available in practically infinity supply that can be consumed at zero cost or trade-off of other goods is not scarce. Alternatively, if consumers are indifferent to a resource and do not have any desire to consume it, or are unaware of it or its potential use entirely, then it is not scarce even if the total amount in existence is clearly limited. However, even resources take for granted as infinitely abundant, and which are free in dollar terms, can become scarce in some sense.
Take air, for example. From an individual’s perspective, breathing is completely free. Yet there are a number of costs associated with the activity. It requires breathable air, which has become increasingly difficult to take for granted since the Industrial Revolution. In a number of cities today, poor air quality has been associated with high rates of disease and death. In order to avoid these costly affairs and assure that citizens can breathe safely, governments or utilities must invest in methods of power generation that do not create harmful emissions. These may be more expensive than dirtier methods, but even if they are not, they require massive capital expenditures. These costs fall on the citizens in one way or another. Breathing freely, in other words, is not free.
