Strategy Making Process for Innovation within Alibaba Organization

Running head: STRATEGY MAKING PROCESS FOR INNOVATION 1
Strategy making process for innovation within Alibaba Organization
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STRATEGY MAKING PROCESS FOR INNOVATION 2
Strategy making process for innovation within Alibaba Organization
Strategic innovation is mainly focused on creating a sustainable superior performance. A
robust strategy is extremely important in every organization to achieve a competitive advantage.
Due to the limited resources, organizations make strategic decisions to achieve and sustain a
competitive advantage. As pointed out by Lee & Olson (2016), innovation strategy making is set
to commit a corporate to specific technologies, resources, products and markets over a long
period of time. It enables an organization to match its existing resources with opportunity as well
as risk in outside environment. In order for an organization to make a well-articulated strategy,
the corporate must its mission, external factors, strength and weakness as well as threats in the
dynamic and challenging market. In this essay, we discuss the strategy making process for
innovation within Alibaba Corporation.
Alibaba Inc. is an e-commerce organization which was formulated by Jack Ma back in
the year 1999. The business is based in Hangzhou, China. The corporate has a business to
business online platform which serve the needs of its suppliers and buyers. The business has a
wholesale platform for small scale buyers who seek to ship small amounts of goods from global
site (Choi, 2017). Alibaba also provides internet infrastructure services and business
management software which targets its business across China. Alibaba’s group mission is to
make it easy to do business from anywhere. As such, the business is armed with core commerce,
cloud computing, digital media and entertainment as well as innovation initiatives to help it
achieve its mission. The organization generates a bulk of its revenue from its online platforms
including, alibaba.com, tmall.com and taobao.cm. Along with the stated sources of funds that
operates Alibaba, a considerable amount of funds also come from Alibaba cloud computing, an

STRATEGY MAKING PROCESS FOR INNOVATION 3
online pay system like Paypal known as Alipay, and laiwang messaging application to mention a
few.
In summary of the organization’s SWOT analysis, the key strength of Alibaba is its scale
of operation and the market where it majorly operates. China is the country with the highest
population in the world and to have stronghold in such kind of market besides being the leader in
the market is not a mean feat (Kantar, 2019). Another noteworthy strength of the business is its
market share. According to Long (2019), 60% of China’s market share is dominated by three
organizations including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent of which Alibaba accounts for 32% of the
market share. Alongside the organization’s strength, its major weakness is that it ways massive
sellers. The organization does not put any qualification for its sellers, as such, it has a large
number of online sellers competing in the market.
In Alibaba’s opportunities, the key opportunity of the organization is the current
innovation. The advanced technology has come with various opportunities including cloud
computing, Artificial intelligence and machine learning to mention a few that the organization
can exploit to achieve its mission to make it easy to do business anywhere (Kim & Chen, 2016).
Along with that, other opportunities Alibaba have is its rise in investment and trust by people.
The organization’s major threat, however, is the Flipkart and Amazon in India. As such, if
Alibaba wants to expand its business in other countries especially in India, the organization’s
biggest threat is the establishment of Flipkart and Amazon in the country.
There is a number of resources that determines the value of the organization’s innovation.
The adoption of cloud computing by the organization infer Alibaba’s innovation efforts. As
stated by Ma, “Large scale computing and data are the father and mother of Artificial
intelligence AI.” The company has heavily increased its focus on cloud computing (Leavy,