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…

At the end of each day’s seminar, Quinn coordinated a three hour discussion with all Kirkham employees in attendance of the course to discuss how each day’s concepts could be used in their situation and also to devise an action plan for implementation of these ideas when they all returned to their regular work the following week. In addition, each division’s managing director presented their action plan to Mr. Michael Donaldson at the end of the final day of the seminar. The action plans from each of the four division’s managing directors had three key concepts First, the directors pointed out that Kirkham Instruments’ technology and product development system was functioning far past its abilities; most marketers and engineers were overburdened as they were assigned to three to six projects on which they worked concurrently. It was agreed that a workload reduction of approximately 50% would be necessary. Second, everyone agreed that Kirkham needed to adopt the HBS trio’s aggregate project plan, presented as a typology of projects-breakthrough, platform, derivative, and support-defined by the type of technological change (none, incremental, next generation, radically new) vs. the impact of the product on the market (new category, new benefit, improvement in existing benefit, variants). Each division manager had concluded to some point that there was need in focusing more resources on projects of breakthrough or platform