Ansoff Matrix

To portray alternative corporate growth strategies, Igor Ansoff presented a matrix that focused on the firm's present and potential products and markets (customers). By considering ways to grow via existing products and new products, and in existing markets and new markets, there are four possible product-market combination. Ansoff's matrix is shown below:

Ansoff Matrix

	Existing Products	New Products
Existing Markets	Market Penetration	Product Development
New Markets	Market Development	Diversification

Ansoff's matrix provides four different growth strategies:

• Market Penetration - the firm seeks to achieve growth with existing products in their current market segments, aiming to increase its market share.

• Market Development - the firm seeks growth by targeting its existing products to new market segments.

• Product Development - the firms develops new products targeted to its existing market segments.

• Diversification - the firm grows by diversifying into new businesses by developing new products for new markets. source:Quickmba
  

Thought of the Day

'Happiness is an elusive state of mind, not to be gained by clumsy pursuit. It is givento those who do not sue for it; to be unconcerned about a desired good is probablythe only way to possess it.'- Ruskin Bond

Cleopatra

Cleopatra VII Philopator (in Greek, Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ; January 69 BC – 30 BC) was a Hellenistic ruler of Egypt, originally sharing power with her father Ptolemy XII and later with her brothers/husbands Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV; eventually gaining sole rule of Egypt. Cleopatra committed suicide, the traditional date being 12 August 30 BC, allegedly by means of an asp bite.

The Egyptian cobra is the most common cobra in Africa and is responsible for many deaths in Africa. It lives from the Sahara Desert to the Syrian Desert. The Egyptian cobra, like all other cobras, raises its hood when in danger.
The Egyptian cobra is nocturnal. But it can be seen basking in the sun at times in the early morning. females lay 8-33 eggs in termite mounds, and the eggs hatch after an incubation time of 60 days.
Most ancient sources say that Cleopatra committed suicide by being bitten by an aspis, which translates into English as "asp." Plutarch tells us that she did experiments on condemned prisoners and found aspis venom to be the most painless of all fatal poisons. Today it is generally believed that this "aspis" is the Naja haje.
A stylised Egyptian Cobra, representing the goddess Wadjet, was the symbol of sovereignty of the pharaohs, and therefore, it is also called Uraeus serpent.

Shrew's Fiddle

A shrew's fiddle or neck violin is a variation of the yoke, pillory or rigid irons whereby the wrists are locked in front of the bound person by a hinged board or steel bar.[1] It was originally used in the 18th century as a way of punishing women who were caught arguing or fighting.

source: wikipedia

Mariana Trench

The Mariana Trench (or Mariana's Trench) is the deepest part of the world's oceans, and the deepest location on the surface of the Earth's crust. It has a maximum depth of about 11 km (6.8 mi), and is located in the western North Pacific Ocean, to the east and south of the Mariana Islands, near Guam.
The trench forms the boundary between two tectonic plates, where the Pacific Plate is subducted beneath the Philippine Plate. The bottom of the trench is farther below sea level than Mount Everest is above it (8,848m/29,028ft). At the bottom, the water column above exerts a pressure of 108.6 MPa, over one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.
source:wikipedia

Lava Lake (Nyiragongo)

Mount Nyiragongo is a volcano in the Virunga Mountains associated with the Great Rift Valley. It is located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 20 km north of the town of Goma and Lake Kivu and just west of the border with Rwanda. The main crater is 250 m deep, two km wide and sometimes contains a lava lake. Nyiragongo and nearby Nyamuragira are together responsible for 40% of Africa's historical volcanic eruptions.

source: wikipedia

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge tend to think that they know more than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less. Dunning and Kruger were awarded a 2000 Ig Nobel prize for their work.
The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.
Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (as Charles Darwin put it). They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

• Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.


• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.


• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.


• If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.
  They set out to test these hypotheses on human subjects consisting of Cornell undergraduates who were registered in various psychology courses. In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning examined self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank, whereupon the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated their own rank. As Dunning and Kruger noted,
  Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
  Meanwhile, people with true knowledge tended to underestimate their competence. A follow-up study suggests that grossly incompetent students improve both their skill level and their ability to estimate their class rank only after extensive tutoring in the skills they had previously lacked.
  Daniel Ames and Lara Kammrath extended this work to sensitivity to others, and the subjects' perception of how sensitive they were. Some more work by Burson Larrick and Joshua Klayman has suggested that the effect is not so obvious and may be due to noise and bias levels.

Source :Wikipedia