Self-driving car
For this project, you will begin by deciding upon a specific business situation for you to write your report for. The Project 2 Planning Memo in Week 4 will ask you to pick a specific industry and a specific company (real or imagined) within that industry. Then you will choose one of the disruptive technologies (see the Research Areas section below) that is expected to have an impact on businesses worldwide in the coming years. For this project, you should consider your instructor as playing the role of your boss who has asked you, his or her employee, to do some background research on the issue of a specific emerging technology and how it will affect the company. Your boss’s main concerns are:
1. How is this emerging disruptive technology changing the nature of our business and how we can conduct our business, both within and outside of the company?
2. How can we (the company) remain relevant and/or competitive in this changing technological landscape?
While your boss will provide you with as many guidelines as possible for this report, you are being given the responsibility to craft the content, organization and structure of information in the report, and to present your research in a way that makes the most sense (i.e. fitting the form to the content).
We will learn about the report genre and research methodology, but there will be little in the way of step by step guidance through the whole research process. What I expect from you is to approach the topic professionally and seriously and deliver the information requested in a well designed and well organized form. The final product should not just meet the genre expectations for this type of report; it must answer your boss’s questions about your chosen emerging technology and his or her business in a concise, direct and well organized manner.
If you feel lost at any point during the project, keep in mind that a major point of this project is to give you practice working through uncertainty by keeping focused on the final objectives. Setting ambitious but achievable goals will help you stay focused as well as push you to do your best. Additionally, reading this overview carefully will be a great help in keeping yourself focused on the big picture of Project 2.
The aim of this report is to articulate the main positions that professionals take in relation to a disruptive technology in the particular industry you have chosen. To that end, using your research skills and your own knowledge of the industry, you will create an 8-12 page report
The report is to include the following sections in this order:
1. Title Page (1 page)
2. Memo of Transmittal (for internal reports) (no longer than 1 page)
3. Table of Contents
4. List of Illustrations
5. Executive Summary (no longer than 1 page)
6. The Main Report (including the Introduction, Body Sections, and Conclusion)
7. References / Bibliography (MLA or APA style acceptable)
