Entrepreneurship 320 - Book Report/Review Example

Case study: Bank of America How it learned that what s really want is to keep the change It is evident from the article that innovation in services is not easy. The author states an example of financial service where the first major innovation was online banking nearly ten years ago. However, bank of America made a significant innovation termed keep the change, which is very critical in solving various banking problems. For instance, the innovation helps banks to convince customers open new accounts.

The Bank of America hired a research and design company called Palo Alto in 2004 to assist carry out ethnographic research on women with children. The aim was to find a way of how to get this customer to open a new savings account. The Keep Change innovation experienced some problems but after a team of software engineers, financial experts and products were called in to improve the idea, it changed the way of doing business. The new team added some features such as a summary of the rounded up transactions in customer accounts, a promotion to match the rounded up transactions to savings of $ 250 annually and a fail-safe feature that thwarted automatically a transaction or transfer from pushing a customer’s saving account.

Keep the change innovation was successful but the problem was selling it to the customers. Despite the challenge, Bank of America organized for a marketing event and press conference in order to educate people on the new concept. The bank managed to sell the concept to the public but it still promote Keep the Change on its website and it has purchased ads with search engines. The idea was a success because those people who used keep the change still uses it today. Real life imitates real world: Reena Jana Best Buy Company sells electronic goods.

The company has used various techniques to ensure that it succeeds in beating its competitors. For instance, when the firm picked four salespeople aged between 20 and 30, it required them to stick together for 10 weeks so that it could roll out quickly its electronic business. The arrangement did not disappoint because currently different Best Buy stores provide service known as best buy studio, which offers web design consultation for emerging and small businesses. The idea of staying together for ten weeks seemed to have sped up team building process, which is very essential in businesses.

This is because employees work together for long hours talking about business matters. Therefore, such brainstorming sessions employed by Best Buy Company is common in technology sector since engineers and programmers stay together so that they can get a breakthrough on certain things. Since the purchase of electronic goods is dwindling nowadays, Best Buy studio managers do not say whether the real world version of The Real World will be restored for 2009. However, these managers say they are maintaining the Best Buy studio in that they are weighing options whether to expand it or not.

In addition, front line employees have been urged to come with new business concepts since they do not require permission to innovate or create.