Zoom's High Importance on Innovation

ZOOM
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Zoom
Part A
Question 1: Zoom and Innovation
Zoom's high Importance on Innovation
Zoom focuses on innovation to achieve specific objectives and adequately integrates business functions to promote facilitation. Due to the highly competitive industry, Zoom needs to be highly innovative. According to Jakšić et al. (2018), innovation is a significant way of gaining a higher competitive advantage by establishing unique products in a highly competitive market. Innovation is based on implementing unique business ideas resulting in new services or products (Siemon et al., 2018). The concept of innovation is effective for Zoom for different reasons. For instance, it would define customer satisfaction and happiness, and zoom aims to innovate new products that can make the customers satisfied and happy. Change is a common aspect that the customer requires to feel unique from others in the communication industry. Therefore, by embracing innovation, Zoom would gain a better chance of meeting different customer needs and desires.
Zoom was launched in 2012 with video communication as a major platform. Besides, it was heavily considered a 'single-click solution,' which attracted many customers since it was easy to use (Zoom, 2021). The customers were happy since they did not need to use a long process of creating new accounts. Its competitors, such as Skype, made the process complex for the customers since they had to sign into new accounts before using it. Zoom focused on the business function to attract more customers and facilitate innovation. Besides, Zoom used other tactics, such as creating a unique video experience for the customers, which shows that the focus of the innovation was to promote customer satisfaction. Therefore, the main reason for Zoom placing high importance on innovation is customer contentment. Since 2012, Zoom has also used different strategies to constantly improve its quality by initiating changes in its departments. The company mobilized different investors, including capitalists, to ensure adequate finance for innovation. Innovation is expensive and requires adequate funding through work capital management and retained earnings to adopt new technology changes (Keynes, 2018a). Besides, implementing new ideas to practicality requires extra operation and implementation costs. Therefore, the finance approach allows the company to meet the threshold for expansion.
Additionally, Erick Yuan, the founder of Zoom, aligned innovation's importance to employee happiness. According to Gupta et al. (2018), innovative ideas can come from any part of the organization, from the employees and management to customers. Therefore, Zoom used specific strategies to ensure that employees were happy and satisfied. It focused on incentives, including book clubs and fun events. The strategy was meant to motivate the employees to have an innovative mindset to promote organizational success. For instance, 150 out of 2500 volunteered to ensure Zoom meets different innovative thresholds and thus classified as a 'happy crew.' (Zoom, 2021). Zoom created a culture of happiness and a conducive environment that would allow employees to conduct different research for increased innovation. Yuan's environment made many employees part of the family, leading to high productivity and growth.
Zoom's Business Functions
From the case study, different business functions promote Zoom's innovation. Zoom established a body that would conduct reliable research for understanding the consumers' demands and interests. Before a company establishes a new product or product design, research is necessary to ensure that it aligns with the customers' expectations (Whitacre et al., 2019). The research body works with the innovation team to ensure that innovation is streamlined to the customer's needs. The team also works with the marketing arm since they can engage the customers and understand their expectations. The marketing and research team collects the data from the customers and submits them to the engineering team to streamline their innovation. The identified business functions work collectively, thus making it meets customer expectations during the innovation program.
Additionally, Zoom uses services that can easily be used and are effective. The approach allowed the company to acquire more users during the COVID-19 pandemic since different business ideas and education were conducted using the company’s platform. Due to the increase in the number of users, the research team had to focus on new ideologies that would satisfy their customers, such as initiating the ability of the users to filter videos (Zoom, 2021). The main reason was to improve user experience and increase the customers' interaction with each other through the company platform. Allowing the users to use filters was also a strategy that allowed the consumers to have the same experience as other media platforms. Therefore, all the listed business functions enhanced customer engagement and the company's growth.
Zoom is a highly competitive company and must focus on unique strategies and business functions that can make it remain competitive, relevant, and innovative. Its main focus of innovation is to attract more talents by promoting employee happiness and satisfaction. Lastly, its business functions adequately interact to facilitate innovation and increase user experience.
Question 2: Threats and Opportunities
Threats
Competition
Zoom's main threat is intensified competition in the global trade environment. Competition is a threat since it can either lead to failure or success of the company. Whenever a company cannot handle its competitors, it becomes easy to have adequate market share and growth. According to Keynes (2018b), competing in the global context is critical since consumers advocate for services with the best user experience. Therefore, a company must be unique and consider product differentiation. The major competitors in a similar industry as Zoom include Google Hangouts and Skype. The competitors are a critical threat since they were established earlier and have existed in the industry for a long period. The competitors have trustworthy customers who can only move to Zoom whenever they have a better user experience. Competition globally can be appealing since the customers do not go for the location but quality and experience (Tallman et al., 2018). Zoom company must use effective strategies to gain a competitive advantage in resolving the competitive threat. Competition is also a threat to Zoom since it is a new company focusing on video communication. Microsoft and Google are known for other online services and can use them to outshine zoom. Therefore, Zoom must handle competition effectively to retain its customers.
Security
Zoom also faces security threats. The case study shows that many security threats emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic (Zoom, 2021). The emergence of such security threats was caused by new customers attracted to the company due to lockdowns. Security is a critical problem to the company's success since data loss can be experienced, making other competitors access key information (Brondoni, 2018). Different evidence showed that Zoom faced security issues. For instance, hacker meetings were observed, jeopardizing users' privacy and trust in the company. There were also instances of data sharing with other companies, which impacted its privacy. The listed activities are critical since they impact the company's future and customer loyalty. The hackers went ahead to interrupt different online classes using racist content and attacks. The identified security threats jeopardized Zoom's position on data encryption. A company that uses end-to-end encryption cannot easily be hacked. Therefore, it makes the customer lose trust in the company and opt for other security companies.
Opportunities
High Revenue and Rapid expansion
The key opportunity for Zoom is the rapid expansion due to high revenue and profitability. The company's profitability is rapidly increasing due to more consumers using the platform. COVID-19 created the opportunity to make many individuals recognize the company's presence. For instance, the case study shows that the pandemic increased downloads by 2,680%, which is a significant improvement (Zoom, 2021). The percentage shows that the company acquired new custome...