Tag: mobile technology

OM in the News: Life Cycles and the Smartphone

When Steve Jobs demonstrated the first iPhone in 2007, the audience was amazed by features we consider mundane today

“Steve Jobs took to a stage a dozen years ago this week to introduce a revolutionary new product to the world: the first Apple iPhone,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 16, 2019). That groundbreaking device, and the competitors that followed, changed the way people communicated, ordered dinner and hailed a taxi. The technology world reoriented around the smartphone, supplanting the PC, MP3 players, the digital camera and maps. The mobile economy was born.

Today, it looks like the era of smartphone supremacy is starting to wane. The devices aren’t going away any time soon, but their grip on the consumer is weakening. A global sales slump and a lack of hit new advancements has underlined a painful reality for the matured industry: smartphones don’t look so smart anymore. Wristwatches can now text emojis. Televisions can talk and listen. Voice-activated speakers can order diapers.

The number of “connected” devices in use that can stream music, clock mileage or download apps has more than doubled to 14 billion in the past 3 years. Now the universe has expanded to voice apps, car infotainment centers and wearable devices. Like the arc of the PC, smartphones may be engaged in a race downward. Titans Apple and Samsung risk seeing their high-end phones become commoditized, as Chinese rivals Huawei and Xiaomi prove capable of making similar devices at lower prices.

More than half of the world’s population now owns a smartphone. While that leaves billions of potential first-time buyers in poorer areas, they offer lower profits. Meanwhile, the market in the U.S. has become saturated, as the improvements in the devices become more incremental and many consumers have decided they don’t need to get each new upgrade. In developed markets, smartphone usage may be reaching its upper limits, as some consumers pull back amid acknowledgment their phones can be addictive, spur anxiety, distract drivers and cast a pall of silence over the dinner table.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Referring to the product life cycle curve in Figure 2.5, where does the iPhone fit?
  2. Do your students agree that smartphones are “in a race downward”?

OM in the News: U.S. Productivity–Is It Missing or in Hiding?

productivityI always start my OM course with a discussion of why productivity is so important. As The Wall Street Journal (July 17, 2015) writes: “Productivity matters, because at a 2% annual growth rate, it takes 35 years to double the standard of living; at 1%, it takes 70. Low productivity growth slows the economy and holds down wages.” For well over a century, we have been able to increase productivity at about 2.5% per year. But for a decade, economic output per hour worked—the federal government’s formula for productivity—has barely budged. Over the past two quarters, in fact, it has fallen. Sluggish productivity is raising alarms all the way to Federal Reserve Chairwoman.

Silicon Valley economists, though, say productivity means giving people and companies tools to do things better and faster. By that measure, there is an explosion under way, thanks to the gadgets, apps and digital geegaws spewing out. Consider the efficiency of hailing a taxi with an app on your mobile phone, or finding someone who will meet you at the airport and rent your car while you’re away (a new service in San Francisco). Add in online tools that instantly translate conversations or help locate organ donors. They also make the U.S. more productive, don’t they?

In 1987, during the last period of productivity hand-wringing, Nobel economist Robert Solow quipped: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” From 1995 to 2004, it finally looked like the digital age was paying off: Productivity growth rates closed in on 3%; since 2010, they have dipped below 1%. Yet in Silicon Valley, the idea of a productivity slowdown seems ridiculous to technologists. At the heart of their argument is the free and invaluable Internet search, cutting short the time to, say, learn how to grow geraniums or find the best Mexican restaurant. Many economists question why productivity measures can’t capture the full benefit of improved products and services, such as a refrigerator that signals when the milk is getting low.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Why is productivity so important to citizens and to nations?

2. How can productivity be increased at, say, the Post Office?

Guest Post: Teaching OM With Mobile Technologies at the U. of Dayton

lance chenDr. Lance Chen, Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton Business School, shares his experience in striving for teaching excellence with mobile technologies.

At University of Dayton, high quality teaching is a foremost performance measure for each faculty member. I teach an introductory OM course, with Jay and Barry’s 11th edition. (Click here to see my U. Dayton Syllabus). We cover 14 Chapters with 25 meetings. To deliver a lecture with clarity with such a limited amount of time, I adopt mobile technology because mobile devices are highly accessible to nearly all the students and the time can be very flexible.

I have thus far created 50 YouTube videos ranging from 2 to 20 minutes to show the re-do of selected book examples and sample homework problems. There are 2 reasons for this: (1) I realize that the course presentation may create some learning gaps between the lecture and the homework problems. These gaps can be fixed by practicing more live examples; and (2) the textbook examples are largely about manual calculations with great detail. However, the learning objective of this course is to let most students stay focused on big picture of OM. Thus, the goal of these video clips is to stimulate student learning activities and to establish the linkage between course contents and practice.

Students love it! More than 80% of students watch all the videos and they seem to be motivated. The peak number of visits happens from 8-11pm. In my opinion, the reason the videos are so popular is that homework seems to be a set of real-world examples and greatly valued in practice.  Furthermore, their interactions provide great stimulation. In addition to the active Q&A exchanges during lectures, more students show up during office hours, often with comments on how much they value the videos.

Regardless of their nice words, there are many things that need to be done. First, I  try to make every video less than 7 minutes because lengthy videos, just like hour-long presentations, lose students’ attention quickly. Second, I need to add tags with brief description on each video clip that students can use to quickly identify the learning objective.

To me, teaching future executives is not only an honorable profession, but also a creative activity– just like research. I really enjoy it!