Understanding IT Innovations

1. Which of the following describe the role of governments in facilitating the emergence of IT innovations?

   • The government can facilitate innovations by directing training / education sectors to specific skill sets
   • The government can facilitate innovations through grants (拨款) and tax incentives (税收优惠)
   • The government can facilitate innovations by promoting market competetions

2. Which of the following best convey the meaning of the word innovationas typically used in the technology innovation literature: Innovation refers to the first actual use of a new idea in society.

3. The development and release of a new form of mixed reality (MR) headset is an example of: Product innovation.

4. In our tutorial, we discussed ‘historically, publicity-funded research has been essential’. Which of the following best describe the importance of public funding: Public funding is able to invest in projects / innovations with non-monetary returns and high risks.

5. Innovation that involves changes to parts of a product system without significantly affecting the product's overall design is Component innovation.

6. Utterback and Abernathy introduced the concept of "design dominance" (or dominant design) in an industry. Which of the following statement best explain the concept: The open architecture of the IBM PC architecture with (mostly) specified interfaces.

7. In our tutorial, we discussed that Android OS maybe considered to be the dominant design in the smartphone OS market. Which of the following statement is a correct factor that led to this?

   • Android supports / provides: Learning effects
   • Android supports / provides: Self-reinforcing cycle
   • Android supports / provides: OS Architecture / Open source platform

8. Creative destruction is: Waves that restructure entire industries and markets in favour of those who grasp (抓住) and adapt to technological changes faster.

9. With Design dominance, there are two distinct Eras (时代): Era of Ferment (动乱的时代) and Era of Incremental Change (渐进变化的时代). Pick a statement that the two Eras: Era of incremental change involves elaborations of dominant design(s) (主导设计的精化).

10. According to Christensen, innovations can be either disruptive or sustaining. Which of the following is true of disruptive innovations: They create new markets or change the value network in an existing market.

11. In the lecture, we discussed several concepts that are important for “diffusion of innovation”. What is the most correct concept from below: "The chasm (鸿沟)" is between early adopters and early majority.

12. Which of the following statement is true：

    • “Low-end disruption” - there are customers who do not need the full functionality or performance of products already on the market so cheaper alternatives can take over.
    • "Innovator's dilemma (困境)" occurs when most important existing customers are the high-end ones who spend the most.
    • "New-market disruption" - there are customers who have needs that were not being addressed by existing products.

13. In our MOOCS tutorial, we discussed ‘MicroMasters’ as a new program with a three-way arrangement. What is the three-way arrangement: Three-way arrangement involving educator, student and employer, in the development of the courses.

14. In Week 3 Tutorial, we discussed how network affects the VR dominance. Which of the following statement is correct: Direct network effects - increase in usage leads to direct increase in value.

15. Marc Andreessen explained that "all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale". Which of the following conditions (amongst other conditions) did he say contribute to this situation: Software programming tools and Internet services making it easier to launch new global start-ups.

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1. There are companies such as Google and Facebook, which has the capacity to have their own open innovation platform (e.g., within their own company) but chose to use other platforms e.g., Topcoder and Kaggle. Which statement below is correct?

   • An advantage of using other Open innovation platforms is that they can be used as a part of agile process where innovators could offer feedbacks after comparing the solutions with similar innovations.
   • An adavantage of using other Open innovation platforms is that they have broader audiences / expert groups.
   • The advantage of using other Open innovation platforms is that they have a good technology that supports the platform as it is used by many users in the platform's community.

2. Which of the following is an example of “outside-in” innovation for a company: To acquire a third party company and integrate its product to existing projects.

3. Company A is developing a new web-based application which requires a specific speech recognition function. Using the concept of “crowdsourcing”, which of the following would be an example of the Company A using crowdsourcing as part of their innovation: Company A creates a description of the needed speech recognition functionality and puts out an open call through the Innovative website to find a person or company to develop this functionality.

4. We studied the concept of ‘Customer Development Process’. Based on the diagram below, which statement correctly represent the ‘Customer Discovery’ phase?

   

   Customer discovery

   Capture vision and turn it into business model hypotheses. Develop plan to test hypotheses with customers. Test hypotheses.

5. Which of the following is an example of user innovation: An individual writing his/her own smartphone app for managing his/her "To Do" list.

6. When involving potential users in an idea generation for the development of innovative products and services, according to von Hippel, which of the following class of users tends to lead to the most effective innovation: Lead users - i.e. users who have needs that are months or years ahead of the general marketplace.

7. Over the past few decades, there has been a movement away from the majority of company research and development being conducted in large R&D labs toward more diverse “open innovation”; companies rely to a growing extent on the involvement of other entities (other companies, universities, individuals, etc) in their innovation. Which of the following social, technological, and policy factors is likely to have contributed to this?

   • Better cloud-based IT infrastructure, e.g., Web APIs, allowing individuals or small companies to quickly develop new products and services.
   • Greater availability of crowdfunding allowing individuals or small companies to grow quickly to become significant within a particular technological field.
   • Improved communication technologies allowing easier working between companies and their partners (locally and overseas).

8. Which of the following is the most likely reason for a small start-up company to have an advantage over established large companies when developing an innovative product: Ability to change the direction of product functionality and business model rapidly based on learning iteratively through customer interaction.

9. Which of the following statement is correct in describing the benefits of Open innovation:

   • Share risks and pool resources with rivalry companies.
   • Accumulate large knowledge base from external parties.
   • Lower the costs for R&D departments.

10. Modularity is a crucial enabler for open innovations. Select the correct statement: A standard interface which enables components to be combined (e.g. by users, withnin company, between companies), and enables many different configurations to be achieved from a given set of components.

11. In week 8’s lecture, we learnt about the start-up companies. Which one of the statement below best explains the differences between start-ups and established companies: Start-up companies focus on the hypothesis-driven experiments in customer development.

12. ‘Users’ have been proven to be one of the major drivers for innovations. Which of the following statement best describes ‘user-led’ innovation: User-led innovations do not always lead to competetive advantages.

13. Which of the following statements correctly describe a platform ecosystem: Platform business bring together producers and consumers in high-value exchanges. Their key assets are information and interactions (including network effects and self-reinforcing cycle), which together are also the source of the value they create and their competitive advantage.

14. We studied Values of Open Data. Which of statement best is correct: Open data can be used by the research community to develop a competitive advantage in technology development.

15. Which of the following statement is a correct description that distinguishes between “open source” and “free” software (using Free Software Foundation definition): Open source software can protect the integrity of author's source code, whereas Free software does not protect the integrity of the author's source code.