Emirates NBD Bank Innovative Strategies

Emirates NBD Bank Innovative Strategies Emirates NBD Bank’s Description Emirates NBD Bank was formed in 2007 when the National Bank of Dubai and the Emirates Bank International merged. The bank’s website is www.emiratesnbd.com/.Advertising We will write a custom case study sample on Emirates NBD Bank Innovative Strategies specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More The website is a convenient portal from where the bank’s customers from diverse countries (i.e. the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Singapore, Qatar, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, China and India) contact the bank and inquire more about the services that Emirate NBD offers. (Emirates NBD 2014a). Notably, Emirates NBD has more than 9,000 employees from 70 nations across the world (Emirates NBD 2014a). Emirates NBD ranks first among other UAE banks by assets, equity and profits. Its competitors include First Gulf Bank, the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) and Mashreq among others (see figure 1 below). By 2008, it had 20 percent market share in the UAE (Ajman 2014) Figure 1: Emirates NBD ranks first by assets, equity and profits when compared to other banks in the UAE Source: Emirates NBD (2010)Advertising Looking for case study on business economics? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More At the apex of Emirate NBD’s management is the Group CEO. Middle and lower managers include the Group Chief Operating Officer (COO), the General Manager (GM) Human Resource, GM Risk, GM Retail Banking and Wealth Management, GM International, Chief Financial Officer (CFO), GM Internal Audit, CEO Tanfeeth, Group Treasurer and Group Secretary, in that order. Innovation Policies and strategies at the company The Business Dictionary (2014, para. 1) defines an innovation strategy as the â€Å"plan made by an organisation to encourage advancements in technology or services†. An innova tion policy is however not specifically defined in literature. From the word policy, however, one can infer the meaning of innovation policy as the course of action that an organisation takes in relation to the use of innovations. From Emirate NBD’s website, it is clear that the bank has a course of action to take and plans to follow in the adoption and utilisation of innovations. The bank, for example, indicates its commitment to give â€Å"customers innovative services† through the provision of cutting-edge technology (Emirates NBD 2014b, para. 3). An example of one such innovative service was the electronic initial public offering (eIPO), which Emirates NBD offered during the recent Emaar Malls IPO which took place on September 14, 2014 (Emirates NBD 2014b; Gulf News 2014). Another innovation by the bank was the interactive automated teller machine (ITM) (see appendix A), which was praised as a ‘game changing innovation’, (Cabral 2013, p.1). The ITM is also fraud-proof since it verifies the customer’s identity before processing any transaction, and can also take 30 cheque deposits from one customer at a time (Cabral 2013). The ITM is of specific interest to this paper because it arguably combines product and process innovations to provide bank customers with an experience that is not only satisfactory, but effective too. Product innovation is defined as â€Å"a good or service that is significantly improved†, while a process innovation is defined as a â€Å"new or significantly improved production or delivery method† (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2014, para. 1-2).Advertising We will write a custom case study sample on Emirates NBD Bank Innovative Strategies specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Arguably, the new ITM provides an innovative product and process to consumers because the interactive component means that it is a better pro duct, through which customers are able to access better services. The process innovation is evident from the enhanced user experience that customers have on the new machine. Specifically, customers can now get help when they need it from online customer attendants. While the ATM is not an entirely new technology, interactive ATM’s are a relatively new concept especially in the UAE and other parts of the developing world (Cabral 2013). As Campbell, Stonehouse and Houston (2002) indicate, innovation can take the form of modifying a product in order to make it more effective or efficient to the people it serves. Emirate NBD has used the open innovation model described by Chesborough and Crowther (2006), Scotchmer (2005) and Smith (2010) as the use of external and internal ideas for purposes of enhancing technology. According to Cabral (2013), Emirate NBD partnered with the NCR Corporation to develop the ITM, hence suggesting that both internal and external ideas were used. Inter estingly, when it was first launched, the ITM was the first of its kind in the UAE and the bank had installed it for trial purposes. Cabral (2013) indicates that many more such ITMs will be rolled out if users respond positively. Recommendations Among the most impressive qualities of Emirates NBD is its recognition that there are different sources of innovative ideas. As such, the bank does not limit itself to ideas generated in its internal work environment; rather, it partners with external stakeholders who have non-competing business interests, and through such partnerships, makes its innovative strategies a success. Another of Emirate NBD’s impressive qualities is its willingness to follow the innovation stages to the full. For example, it would have been tempting for the bank to skip the pilot testing stage of the ITM by engaging in full scale manufacturing and launch. The bank would have done that especially since initial responses indicated that the ITM would be a succ ess. However, soberness in the bank prevailed and it made the reasonable choice of testing the ITM first. The bank even indicated that installing similar machines would depend on how consumers would respond to the pilot test. The foregoing position is indicative that Emirates NBD understands that all its innovations must be accepted by the customer first, because they (innovations) are meant to enhance the customers’ experience.Advertising Looking for case study on business economics? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More The central place that the consumer occupies in innovation is discussed in numerous literature sources which include Berkun (2010), Narayanan and O’Connor (2010), Ziamou and Veryzer (2005) and Ziamou and Ratneshwar (2003) among others. As a recommendation, Emirates NBD bank should consider partnering with external stakeholders in future, but should also not ignore the innovative potential that is held by its culturally diverse workforce. As Berkun (2010) indicates, people (and especially employees) can be more innovative if they are given the right motivators, tools and environment to be creative and innovative. References Ajman, A 2014, ‘Emirates NBD bank Dubai’, dubaifaqs.com/emirates-nbd.php Berkun, S 2010, The myths of innovation, O’Reilly Media, Newton, MA. Business Dictionary 2014, ‘Innovation strategy’, businessdictionary.com/definition/innovation-strategy.html. Cabral, A 2013, ‘Emirates NBD’s ITM seem to be a game-changing innovation’, Khaleej Times, khaleejtimes.com/biz/inside.asp?xfile=/data/uaebusiness/2013/December/uaebusiness_December210.xmlsection=uaebusiness. Campbell, D, Stonehouse, G Houston, B 2002 Business strategy: an introduction, 2nd edn, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford. Chesborough, H Crowther, A 2006, ‘Beyond high tech: early adopters of open innovation in other industries’, RD Management, vol. 36, no.3, pp. 229-236. Emirates NBD 2014a, ‘About Emirates NBD’, emiratesnbd.com/en/index.cfm/investor-relations/about-emirates-nbd/. Emirates NBD 2014b, ‘Emirates NBD enables UAE’s first eIPO on ATM and online banking channels’, emiratesnbd.com/en/index.cfm/media-centre/media-centre-info/?mcid_en=101. Gulf News 2014, ‘Emirates NBD to allow Emaar Malls IPO subscription via ATM’, http://gulfnews.com/business/markets/emirates-nbd-to-allow-emaar-malls-ipo-subscription-via-atm-1.1383937. Narayanan, V O’Connor, G 2010, Encycl opaedia of technology and innovation management, Wiley-Blackwell, London. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2014, ‘Defining innovation’, oecd.org/site/innovationstrategy/defininginnovation.htm. Scotchmer, S 2005, Innovation and incentives, MIT Press, Cambridge. Smith, D 2010, Exploring innovation, 2nd edn, McGraw-Hill Education, Columbus, OH. Ziamou, P Ratneshwar, S 2003, ‘Innovations in product functionality: when and why are explicit comparisons effective?’ Journal of Marketing, vol. 67, no.2, pp. 49-61. Ziamou, P Veryzer, R 2005, ‘The influence of temporal distance on consumer preferences for technology-based innovations’, Journal of Product Innovation Management, vol. 22, no.4, pp. 336-346. Appendix: The Interactive Automated Teller Machine (ITM) Source: Cabral (2013)

The evolutionary reason reading is hard †and why thats good news

The evolutionary reason reading is hard – and why thats good news This is why reading most documents feels like hard work There’s one thing about reports that people never seem to talk about. Even after 21 years, and training more than 50,000 people to write well, I really cant recall anyone bringing it up. And that secret is this: reading is hard. I don’t mean we find it difficult to read our email or text messages, or even social media. (Though there’s an awful lot more to doing that than you think.) No, I mean reading reports, official guides or any other vaguely technical document is hard. Hard reading is a feeling that’s familiar to us all. We’ve all been there. It’s Friday afternoon and you’re hunched over a dense document, trying in vain to decipher page after page of turgid text. Each sentence seems like an effort as you strain to wrap your head around just exactly what it is the author is meaning to say. More coffee hasn’t helped. You’re now on your third attempt to read the current paragraph and yet – somehow – the words just aren’t going in. And you’re still on the first page. It’s about as enjoyable and effortless as trudging around Ikea on a wet Saturday afternoon – with a hangover. And yet, those words that seem to get lost between the page and your brain are exactly the same ones that someone else thought were the best way to convey important information from their head to yours. Mind-boggling cost I’m not saying this is a new issue – far from it. But these days we have the technology to create these things in vast numbers. Just think how many times something very similar to the above scenario must play itself out in an organisation. The mind boggles at how much that must cost. Yet this is an opportunity as well as a challenge. Reports that are easy to read rise to the top and make way more impact than the rest. They stand out simply because they are different from the majority. And, rather than being a drain on mental resources, they leave us plenty of brain space to consider their implications and make quick decisions on what to do about them. Producing them is easier said than done though. If that were not the case, then everyone would write them and I would have no need to write this blog post. A report thats easy to read is the exception – simply because that’s the type that most people struggle to produce. But theres one important factor here thats easy to overlook. Reading anything is something of a miracle of biology. Understanding that is the key to getting your documents to the top and really making an impact. As you’re reading this, something incredibly complex is going on in your brain. You are looking at greyscale symbols on a screen and converting them into ideas. Abraham Lincoln called it ‘the greatest invention of the world’ – communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye. A human invention And yes, it is an invention. This is not something we evolved to do. We actually evolved to communicate vocally and face to face, over hundreds of millions of years. We’ve been communicating through symbols, what we now call reading, for less than five-and-a-half thousand years. That’s barely a heartbeat in evolutionary terms, and certainly not long enough to have evolved brain structures dedicated to the task. Instead, we take apparatus that we evolved for a whole variety of other situations and co-opt it into deciphering a seemingly endless string of squiggles and dots. We are utilising our brain’s structure for something it was never meant to do. (And on that Friday afternoon, it probably feels like it.) No artificial intelligence can match this feat, even now. You see proof of this every time you answer a website’s demand to confirm that you’re not a robot. That simple statement placed on the site as a graphics file rather than text is all it takes to differentiate you from a cyborg. Narrow focus: your eyes scan text by taking four or five narrow snapshots every second (Dahaene, 2009) Even capturing the words to process is incredible in itself. The fact that you seem to do it easily is just an illusion. In reality, as you are scanning this text, your brain is instructing your eyes to take four or five snapshots every second (known as saccades). There’s only one small area of your retina that has a high-enough resolution to take these pictures (called the fovea), which means that the snapshots themselves are small, too – occupying only about 15 per cent of your visual field. If you stop and freeze your gaze at any one point, you’ll see that you’re only actually focused on one or two words. Each word is then split into fragments, to be reassembled later. And that’s just the start of it. Next, the brain processes the words in the area that all primates – not just us but our monkey and ape cousins – use to recognise symbols and shapes. It’s no coincidence that the shapes most commonly found in nature are also the most common shapes across all written languages – T and L. These shapes (in various orientations) are the most frequent not just in those that use the Roman alphabet – such as English, French, German or Spanish – but Bengali, Thai, Chinese and even the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians. We then cross-check this information against our database of words. Those we recognise get processed down one neural pathway; those we don’t, we mentally pronounce before checking to see if we recognise the sound pattern. We then choose which words we think we’re reading and that (finally) triggers the thought process. Its incredibly complex and to complete it in a fraction of a second takes a lot of brainpower. With most documents, it probably feels like it. You can almost hear the cogs grinding round as it happens. But not all reading feels like hard work. Sometimes you simply don’t notice the cognitive effort going on behind the scenes. In fact, there are many things we read that don’t feel like reading at all. We simply get lost in the flow (even if we didn’t intend to). And that’s the stuff we return to again and again. This doesn’t mean writing that material is easy, of course. Far from it. The old saying ‘easy read, hard write’ has never been more true than when it comes to writing good documents. Make it easier The trick is to write them with the brain in mind. Use good design to make them easy on the eye. Incorporate lots of white space. Use narrow columns that are easy for the eye to scan across and move onto the next line quickly. Use short, powerful words in between the technical ones. Note that this is not the same as eliminating all jargon. Jargon is fine as long as you’re sure that your audience will understand it. But don’t make the process of reading any harder than it needs to be by trying to impress your reader with flowery language. (As Leonardo da Vinci said, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.) Instead, state things as simply as you can, so that the brain doesn’t have to waste cognitive energy on deciphering what you mean. Devise a structure that flows logically. Draw people in at the beginning with a captivating introduction and then keep your reader reading with a document that flows easily from beginning to end. And then finish as powerfully as you started, so that your interaction with the reader doesn’t stop there. You want them to continue thinking about what you’ve written long after they’ve closed the document. Your aim should be to get into their heads, to set up camp in their brains. Communicate your thoughts to their minds through their eyes in as straightforward a way as possible and you’ll really get them thinking. Take this approach consistently and your documents will be in the small minority that resonate with your readers. They may even thank you for it. But even if they don’t, they won’t forget it. And that will put you in a very strong position. References Dehaene, S (2009). Reading in the brain: the science and evolution of a human invention. London: Penguin Liversedge, SP, and Findlay, JM (2000). Saccadic eye movements and cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1): 6-14. Kemmerer, D (2015); The cognitive neuroscience of language. Hove: Psychology Press Rubin, GS, and Turano, K (1992). Reading without saccadic eye movements. Vision Research 32(5): 895-902. Spoehr, KT, and Smith, EE (1975). The role of orthographic and phonotactic rules in perceiving letter patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception and Performance 104(1): 21-34. Image credit: LookerStudio / Shutterstock