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Kirkham Instruments Case Analysis Essay

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You will undoubtedly wish to add/subtract to this paper. I received a high grade on this but it was early in the course and so less analyses were expected. Meaning, you will want to apply those course concepts that suggest alternatives that actors in this case could choose, as relevant to where you are in the course.
Kirkham had a 'strategy' on paper, but it was too vague to help select which New Product Development to fund/cancel. The Harvard professors presented tools to help structure these decisions, but division leaders did not want to see their projects cut, so they criticized the list and delayed action, resulting in no development or implementation of a strategy.

Kirkham Instruments was a manufacturer of laboratory …show more content…

Kirkham Instruments needed to become more closely coordinated between each division with regards to the design of new features and the market introduction of the products while also coordinating the development of new equipment with the analytical software features desired by the customers Kirkham’s strategy was to integrate the different systems of each division into an “all-inclusive” product and also to involve all the divisions together with regards to product development, instead of letting each division be responsible for just products within that division. Mr. Donaldson chose Kathleen Quinn, Vice-President of R&D, to be responsible for coordinating the development of new products. This proved to be quite a challenging task considering that each managing director (of each division) still retained responsibility for the turnover and profitability of their respective decisions and also for the strategies to achieve the goals of their divisions. In addition, regardless of the trend of their customers in purchasing integrated systems, the majority of each division’s turnover came from the sale of stand-alone products. Again, Mr. Donaldson was instrumental in developing a plan to move forward. He had read a report of three Harvard Business School (HBS) professors who had been studying the problems of managing new product development for nearly a decade and instructed Ms. Quinn to invite them to conduct a seminar

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