April, 2003 | The Wiglaf Journal

Setting Prices

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | April 30, 2003

To an outsider, how a company sets prices for new-to-the-world products may resemble black magic coupled with company politics. However, sound pricing practices are rarely a matter of mysticism or bravado. Rather, like other managerial business decisions, appropriate pricing is accomplished through direct qualitative and quantitative approaches. And, in overcoming this sales and marketing challenge,…

Managing By Metrics

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | April 30, 2003 |

Introduction This article illustrates how metrics can be used proactively to manage all levels of a given company or organization. Metrics offer a perspective from an executive level of how a business is performing by gathering these measurements. This is similar to judging a baseball player’s performance by batting average, home runs, and runs batted…

AssureBuy’s Channel Approach

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | April 16, 2003

When hundreds of thousands of transactions per month are required in order to achieve a million dollars in revenue, businesses must embrace a low cost approach to reaching their market. One low cost approach is through channel distribution partners. In 1999, AssureBuy selected to embrace this approach. AssureBuy Organized in ’94, AssureBuy (www.assurebuy.com) initially approached…

Relationships, even eCRM ones, are a two-way street

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | April 16, 2003

Essentially communications works as follows: organizations emit information, and the information is carried to other organizations that sense and interpret it. Media is the thing outside of organizations, between them, that carries information. Books, movies, white papers, email, and purchase orders are all media. Media affects the information it carries. For example, communicating complex mathematics…

Five Steps to Planning for the Future

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | April 2, 2003

In the Industrial Age, public and private enterprises built their future by the expansion of present technology, internal assumptions, and day to day operations. In today’s rapidly changing environment based on global information, this strategy of merely building on the present is defunct. Worldwide markets and instant global communications are now multiplying all our opportunities.…

EMNS Pricing Strategy

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | April 2, 2003

As with all business products and services, the value of technological offerings is determined by the benefits provided to customers. Greater benefits imply higher customer value, and fewer benefits imply lower customer value. Creating value is the first requirement to producing business products and services that customers will demand. Capturing a portion of that value…

Midwest Nanotech – Hype or Reality?

By Tim J. Smith, PhD | April 2, 2003 |

Scientists in the Midwest US have made significant contributions to nanotechnology, but do these advances present real business opportunities in the region? At the Biomedical Opportunities in Nanotechnology panel discussion during CUBIC 2003 on March 7th, experts from business, investors, support agencies, and universities clarified the reality and challenges of creating an economically vital nanotech…