04-612   Market Planning for High Tech Innovation

Course description

To serve their markets, enterprises develop business plans to articulate their business strategy and operation plans to achieve their goals. Market planning is the process used to develop and manage business plans. More than any other industry, the high-tech industry routinely introduces discontinuous innovations. Market planning in high-tech markets poses its own unique problems due to the market and technological uncertainty and the competitive volatility of high-tech environments. In Africa, many IT-based innovations can be considered High-Tech innovations as they offer solutions whose functioning is beyond the reach of common knowledge and they are discontinuous/radical or disruptive innovations, requiring users to change their mode of behavior or modify products or services they rely on. Due to inappropriate business plans many high-tech innovations never make it successfully to the market. High-tech innovations require a different market planning process for their market introduction. In particular, the Technology Adoption Life-Cycle concept will be used to understand how potential buyers respond to discontinuous innovation. In this course, we will cover the market planning process used for developing a market-driven strategy and business plan for high-tech innovations. The process starts with the understanding of the marketplace that the enterprise decided to serve through market analysis, the segmentation of the marketplace based on the customers’ needs (market segmentation), the selection and prioritization of the market segments (portfolio management), and the development of objectives and strategy for each selected segment (strategic planning). Finally, the tactical actions to implement the strategy are documented in a business plan to ensure the integrated execution of all tactical elements. The course will be illustrated with real examples from the IT industry. Students will apply the concepts learned to develop a business plan for a local enterprise in collaboration with its executive team or for their own innovation.

Learning objectives

The primary goal of this course is to provide students with a basic understanding of:

• The challenges of market planning for high-tech innovation
• The key steps in the development of a business plan

This course objective is not to train market planning experts. Instead, the goal is to introduce students to the market planning concepts to encourage them to further educate themselves in that area. It takes years of practical experience to become a market planning expert.

This course is focusing on market planning for IT products and services.

Outcomes

Upon the successful completion of this course, students should:

• Understand the business value of market planning.
• Have a basic understanding of the key steps of the market planning process and be able to perform those steps.
• Have a better understanding of what it takes to know and understand a market.

Content details

The course will cover the following topics:

• Marketing Management and High-Tech Markets
• Market Planning Process
• Vision, Mission, Goals, and Market Definition
• Market Assessment: Environment Analysis and Market Analysis
• Market Assessment: Competitive Analysis and Company Analysis
• Market Segmentation
• Portfolio Management
• Strategy: Technology Adoption Life Cycle
• Value Proposition, Marketing Mix, and Business Plan
• Profit Zone

Prerequisites

None

Faculty

Michel Bezy