Assignment 1: Product from Exercise A2

For group A2, the product presentation is a smart refrigerator, it aims to focus on middle-class families as its customers segment. Selling price would be set around $45,000.

Nowadays, many people are lacking of healthy lifestyle, they love junk food and eat out every night or even they come home, they may eat dessert, ice-cream before go to bed. Therefore, eat healthy is very important. Right now, our group would like to take this opportunity to introduce an intelligent refrigerator as our product pitch.

The intelligent fridge has to be opened by individual figure print. It can create a separate user profile for everyone in the family. Having a smart system built-in the fridge to track the user’s body weight and BMI can be easily measure from time to time. Set weight loss goals and get tips and advice the user to avoid eating the unhealthy food. When the user is assessed unhealthy status, those cabinets of filling with snacks, dessert, ice-cream, soft drinks, juices, sports and energy drinks, etc., will be locked.

Instead, it just allows taking the healthy food and drink from the certain cabinets, meanwhile the user can follow the ingredients to prepare meal in easily cooking way.

The system would say THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION because of your effort in choosing the healthy food and away from junk food.

Let’s enjoy the healthy lifestyle with happy long lasting!

References:

1. How to eat health http://www.bornrich.com/bio-robot-refrigerator.html

2. Bio Robot Refrigerator http://www.wikihow.com/Eat-Healthy

Assignment 1: Product from Exercise A1

Let’s see the product presentation from A1, only the team leader introduces a Nutcracker for 30 seconds.

Presentation from the leader:

As everyone knows the function of a hammer is to serve the nail with proper force, the nail will succumb to the pressure and it will get pounded deeper and deeper into a hole. Indeed, a useful hammer not only serves the nails but also breaks the nutshell just like chestnut. this new product has been innovated by our team recently. We call it multi-purpose hammer.

With a soft silicone head to fit over the end of a hammer, it can contain nuts of various sizes and fit over the steel top of the handle, so when the user "hammers" it down onto a surface, the nut shell will break but remain contained. No other material could do that so well. It is a safety and user-friendly tool. We target mass market segment, expect every single family should have one and it costs $15 bucks per each. YES, it’s a really cheap price to attract customers buy it home!!!

Assignment 1: Teamwork=Creativity+Trust

WRITTEN BY:

CHEN XIAONI, Renee 53635420

LUI LAIKING, Kimmy 53970571

WU XIAOXU, Effie 53659791

A collaborative team is the interaction of involving people work together by sharing opinions and knowledge. To build up mutual trust, enhance creativity and impact positively on the quality of working life for virtual team members become familiarity, honesty and full participation harness the collective expertise of the team. Exercise A1 and A2 reveal two completely different trust management types, one is characterized by low levels of trust while the other is high-trust work environment.

-Exercise A1 presentation/product tended to be marketable

Low trust 

The management types, the supervisor instruct the rest of the team on what is the next direction to proceed with the script writing process.” and “No team member is allowed to talk without the permission to speak from the supervisor.” This means the team members of this company can only receive information or idea from one supervisor. What’s more, this information or idea will be filtered by supervisor firstly. Poor and indirect communication creates suspicion and information loss.

Lack of creativity 

Because of the existing of the supervisor role and the bureaucratic reporting and feedback system, group members are not motivated for brainstorming. Especially due to the criticism every time after speaking, group members are less willing to speak out their own idea and thoughts. It seems the supervisor is the only one who can make decisions.

Low teamwork spirit 

The subordinates never know what next direction that they are going to involve. They feel difficulty to achieve the group’s goal with ambiguous vision.  Group members not allowed laughing during working hours, everyone just focuses on his/her own responsibility without interaction, information is passed to team members strictly on a need to know basis, team environment eventually becomes silence with low creativity, since subordinates can’t develop themselves by giving the opportunities to contribute and build on ideas from the team. Furthermore, the leader decides to present individually that may not be able to reflect the team effectively attract audiences. 

-Exercise A2 presentation/product tended to be creative

High trust 

“Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with everyone.” When employee knows they have the right and the opportunity to communicate with colleagues and boss exactly, they can receive the feeling of supportive and comfortable and thus been motivated from company.

High creativity 

Each group member has the equal rights to speak out, to challenge and to be involved in final dictions. In this kind of democratic atmosphere, group members showed their great activity and motivation in brainstorming. After the collision of thought, it was the best idea that decided the final decision.

High teamwork spirit  

There is high trust in group goals among all team members. Everyone has freedom to communicate with each other to generate different ideas as possible.  They are encouraged to bring out their own ideas via the brainstorming, not only actively and openly share their knowledge and ideas around the whole team, but also accept the criticism from others when proposing the ideas. Letting each member to have high participation by greater clarity in expressing ideas through group discussion can help developing of team goals with creativity.

Conclusion

Successful teams are characterized by a team spirit based around trust, mutual respect that bringing people together work effectively as a team or make appropriates decisions. It also can help improve participants’ confidence, attitudes, motivation and personal satisfaction. To streamline team forces by taking pooling experience and expertise to achieve goal in more efficient use of resources.

References

1. Sanduo Zhou, Chuanming Chen, Minghong Lu. Management Principle and Method. 4th Edition. Shanghai: Fudan University Press; 2008.
2. Xueming Yang, Talking about the trust management of staff in a corporate. http://wenku.baidu.com/view/40ce251dfad6195f312ba63f.html (accessed 06 Jan 2011)
3. Robert F. Hurley, The Decision to Trust. Harvard Business Review Article, 2009, R0609B: 55-62.
4. Constructing excellence Company. Effective Teamwork: A Best Practice Guide for the Construction Industry. Http://212.69.36.161/pdf/document/Teamwork_Guide.pdf?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter (accessed Mar 2004)
5. Teresa M. Amabile, How to Kill Creativity. Harvard Business Review Article, 1998