Digital Microscopy at Carl Zeiss Managing disruption Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

Digital Microscopy at Carl Zeiss Managing disruption Case Solution

Introduction

The strategy summit was held at Harvard business school, in which one of the participants was Ulrich Simon. He was the president of the Microscopy business group at Carl Zeiss AG. With his team members, he was on a mission to drive the company towards achieving a new milestone. Despite being the leader in this system for different fields, he was concerned regarding changing the dilemma of the business because the segment in which the company operated was limited by public funding. The whole purchases in this segment were done by the government.

In order to reduce its dependence on public funding, Ulrich came up with the idea to target private purchasing. They started working on this theme in strategy summit by taking the case of Carl Zeiss Microscopy unit. The different circumstances were taken into consideration by them with a slightly different opinion from industry’s existing trends. However, many well-known players were operating in this industry such as Keyence (Japanese),which was skilled at factory automation. Moreover, Hirox was also an established player in the market since 1978, and it was offering optical systems and high-end lens. Both of the companies got a greater response from the Japanese market because of the increasing manufacturing industries.

Keyence tried to enter into biology market previously, but their work was not that much attractive in this segment, therefore an opportunity in this segment still exists. Ulrich decided to combine two of his previously separated divisions (Independent electron microscopy and light microscopy) as specialists of this company were much famous in the whole industry. By using strengths and capabilities of both divisions, Carl Zeiss would surely achieve its objectives. The main feature which they were considering including in the system was the ease to use. No matter how much technology was used, it was easy to use.

Benno Radio was the new leader of the team who was responsible to build this latest model. Their seating arrangement was also shifted to reduce the chances of interruption and to keep focus on ease of use. Eventually, many of the employees were reluctant to be apart of this new project due to its uncertainty of favorable outcome. Different challenges were faced by team such as:

  • Changing their positions
  • Uncertainty of results
  • Lack of required skills
  • Time limitation
  • Resources limitation
  • Understanding the needs of customers

While facing these challenges, the team performed exceptionally to achieve these objectives. The team interviewed few of the customers of Keyence in order to know how Keyence understands their need,and how their objective will be fulfilled. Moreover, another issue arose regarding sales forces of the company, as how the company would arrange the sales staff for this product

Problem statement

The company was trying to make a system of low end type which would follow the easy to use approach,some questions arose such as after the successful manufacturing of the product, how would the company market it, either through its current distribution or new staff will be hired, and lastly how would the new distribution channel affect the sales...................

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