Phillip July 23, 2024 No Comments

DB FPX 8710 Assessment 4 Integrating Current and Past Literature

Name

Capella university

DB-FPX8710 Strategy and Innovation: Theorizing, Crafting, Executing

Prof. Name

Date

Introduction

CareLead Medical is a healthcare facility that provides hospitals, urgent care centers, and COVID testing facilities. The company was founded in 1987 and has continued to grow. However, CareLead is facing a decline in revenues and profits in recent years. Despite experiencing double-digit annual growth for decades, in the past few years, they have only seen a growth of 1-3%. This has caused a delay in the idea of global expansion as the focus shifts to the current business model.

Business Problem and Gap in Practice

Every business, no matter the success, faces issues that adversely affect the company. These issues are known as a business problem. There could be multiple layers of a business problem, which is why getting to the actual problem leads to breakthrough solutions (Spradlin, 2014). When analyzing the issue, the source of the problem is known as a gap in practice. Identifying the gap in practice and resolving it can create more room for success. Therefore, it is important for any company to take the business problem and identify the gap in practice to resolve and avoid the problem in the future.

Identified Business Problem

CareLead Medical is experiencing a loss of revenue and profit over the last few years after spending decades increasing profit and revenue. The acquisition of the COVID testing and vaccination sites has been difficult as there have been challenges executing the acquisition process due to a lack of knowledge. There is a lack of strategic planning processes within the organization, which is causing a growing problem with CareLead’s profits. This company had been successful for decades until they decided to expand globally. There was a poorly communicated and constructed business strategy which began to become more apparent as the financial losses continued.

Identified Gap in Process

The identified gap in process is the lack of direction and consistent messaging within the executive team outlining a clear strategic strategy, specifically surrounding the acquisition. There is not a clear understanding of the current business model and strategy which has led to confusion within the executive team and the rest of leadership on the clear strategic business model going forward. The acquisition of the COVID centers brought to the surface the breakdown in the leadership and strategy. The global expansion was at the forefront of CareLead’s business strategy. The acquisition was a steppingstone to gain traction with the expansion. The gap in a proper execution strategy of the acquisition not only hurt CareLead financially but also hindered the overall strategy of expanding the company globally. The lack of communication from leadership along with a poorly constructed business model created the gap in process.

Current Supporting Articles

Transformation of strategy within corporations starts with communication. The Corporate Communication International (CCI) studies showed that communication approaches are changing from the traditional top-down approach to a more agile method to adapt to change (Goodman, 2019). This article supports that corporate communication is key to the success of a business model. The communication trends in business have changed over the last few decades and in the example above, when a company does not evolve with the changes, the profitability and production suffer.

CareLead Medical failed to evolve their communication strategy, which led to members of the team attempting to understand the next best steps of action to remain successful and expand. Communicating the business model and strategy along with the method of implementation could have changed the trajectory of the expansion and acquisition, leading to further success instead of losses.

Strategy formulation has a plethora of research to support different theories and methods; however, there is a gap in research on methods to execute strategies (de Oliveira et al., 2019). This article supports the gap in process for CareLead Medical, as the CEO had a business model outlined but failed to provide an execution strategy for the model. The model consisted of acquiring the COVID clinics, which was successful. The breakdown, however, was a lack of execution strategy once the acquisition was finalized. Poor execution of the acquisition began the downward trend in profits and the hold on expanding globally.

Past Supporting Articles

Business models are evolving with societal changes. Often, business models fail due to a lack of evaluation of the implementation of the model which stiffens the successful development (Batocchio et al., 2016). In CareLead’s example, the business model was not communicated adequately. Without proper communication and understanding of the business model, there can be no proper execution. Lacking the proper execution, the acquisition of the COVID clinics caused a rapid decrease in profits as the business model for the acquisition was not formulated and communicated. The focus was on global expansion, which had a detailed business model, but for that model to be successful there needed to be a successful execution of the acquisition. This article outlines the importance of a business model while outlining the steps CareLead could have taken to ensure success.

Removing Personal Bias

To properly support and validate research, it is critical to remove personal bias from the literature selection. Removing the personal bias assists in identifying more relevant research to provide supporting evidence for the topic. If personal bias is not removed from research, the outcomes are unreliable and often inaccurate. For example, if the researcher is thinking about their desired outcome in the study, they will tend to find research to support their desired outcome rather than utilize research that could challenge their desire. Allowing personal bias in research has many negative effects on the project. The researchers’ published work will be discredited, potentially ruining any further work they perform due to a reputation formed on the previous bias work.

In the example of CareLead Medical, the identified issue was poor communication and execution of a business strategy for success. The research performed in the articles outlined properly indicates there is a crucial need for clear communication of the business strategy and execution to be successful. The articles have provided proven information which supports the business problem and gap in process.

Reflection

This assessment has allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of the importance of planning my research prior to starting my project. I have learned to dive deeper into the research and articles I choose to ensure they are valid and accurately prove my points. Creating my literature matrix forced me to read and fully comprehend the resources I wanted to use in all my assessments in this course. This kept my thoughts organized as I completed each assessment.

Not only did I gain vast knowledge in the importance of proper research, I also gained useful skills to apply to my current professional life. I am now able to identify the true business problem in my daily work and get to the root cause and gap in process to make positive and impactful changes using strategy and innovation.

References

Batocchio, A., Ghezzi, A., & Rangone, A. (2016). A method for evaluating business models implementation process. Business Process Management Journal, 22(4), 712–735. https://doi.org/10.1108/bpmj-08-2015-0117

de Oliveira, C. A., Carneiro, J., & Esteves, F. (2019). Conceptualizing and measuring the “strategy execution” construct. Journal of Business Research, 105, 333–344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.03.012