Impact of Technology:
- Process - costs driven down as tech raises productivity Think robots at BMW
- Product - revenues up or down as new offering create or destroy competitive edge
- Barriers - statutory barriers protect markets from new entry think pharmaceuticals.
Past Paper Question Plan
Explain how technological change can affect a firm's costs of production and its methods of production?
15 marks
what do we mean by technological change?
- invention + innovation leads to new products and new ways of doing things usually stimulated by R&D expenditure
- quality and quantity of capital influencing productive capacity
- new opportunities in product markets or dismantling of barriers to entry
- affect on costs
- affect on methods of production
- definition: payments made to factors employed
- technology reduces costs?
- perhaps technology raises productivity of labour (output per worker reducing variable cost or raises value of output per worker)
- could lower productivity? facebook at work (bbc)
- illustrate lower cost
- may raise fixed costs due to investment costs
- technology encorporated into capital
- capital intensive v labour intensive
- knowledge intensive labour (highly skilled and high training requirements) or
- deskilling?
- possibility of scale and scope economies
- 24 hour production 365 days a year
- weakening unions
presentation on invention and innovation (t2u)
innovation and business strategy
kodak case study
kodak in pictures
kodak bankruptcy
bbc click on kodak (jan 2012)
pearson articles and questions
latimes video on kodak
