Innovative Technology Worksheet

Your company, a large online high school, is planning to implement a new innovative social networking technology for their students. The technology would allow students to get to know one another, network, and participate in school activities, such as having virtual student body elections and virtual student committees. The company feels that the ability to have this type of interaction and involvement among students will set the school above the competition.

As the Chief Innovation Officer, you are responsible for the implementation and evaluation of the chosen technology. The company must decide between developing their own social networking system or acquiring a small online high school that has already started development on a similar type of system and is struggling financially. Your director, the company CEO, has come to you with some specific concerns and questions regarding which technology to select.

Submit a one-page response to your director answering all of the following questions:

1. What factors must be considered when implementing an innovative technology internally? What factors must be considered when implementing an externally acquired innovative techology? How do the implementaion issues differ? How are they the same?

2. What factors must be considered when evaluating an internally implemented innovative technology? Why?

3. What factors must be be considered when acquiring an innovative technology externally? Why?

Director,
As your Chief Innovations officer, I felt it was important to relay some information to you about our recent idea of implementing a social networking program to our online schooling system. There are many things to consider when implementing this technology. Internally, this network programming can be tailored to our specifications. This process would also be good for the company as it will reveal the innovative thinking of our current programmers and help us outline our intellectual assets. An externally acquired networking program has benefits and downfalls. While the programming may already be in place, it may or may not be exactly what we are looking for, and we could end up with a program we cannot use, do not like, or countless hours can be spent rewriting program code to make it work within our system.

Implementation of this program has many differences, and how we carry out this implementation will depend on its success.

With an internally implementation, I have faith that our programmers can build this network to meet the needs of our staff and our students. This is a major undertaking and I feel that it is just what we need to test the skills of our staff and their ability to solve problems, work together, and reveal their intellectual thinking processes to the management. An internal implementation will also ensure that the programming is done to our own specifications and not the product of a failing business we externally acquire. This will also be a good opportunity to test these same factors of our current management and assess how they manage their staff.

With an external implementation, I lack faith in the package that we are acquiring. While the company may have already had a social network in place, they have also meet financial troubles and are being left with no option but to sell before they go bankrupt. With business practices like this, I firmly believe that buying a company that is in financial trouble is not always a good deal. Just because two companies merge does not mean they will be successful. We would also have to consider that we could cause a disruption in the workforce we have because we would be acquiring their management and employees as well. On top of trying to implement a program, we would have to deal with training new employees of our policies and procedures, which would add a lot of stress to the implementation process.

In closing, I ask you to consider these factors in your decision on how we should proceed with this process. If this were a merger with a successful or profitable competitor I would feel differently about the process, but I do not see it as a wise decision to acquire a failing business in the hopes of salvaging it. They are failing for a reason and the risk of the same problems from their leaders and employees finding its way into our business environment could lead to the same issues internally here.
Sincerely,
Chief Innovations Officer