Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

5.0 - Key terminology

Strategy refers to significant long-term planning decisions that organizations make in order to meet the needs and wants of their stakeholders. Tesla especially embodies the use of strategy to accentuate innovative outcomes. Innovation, on the other hand, refers to the generation of new ideas in relation to the final product or process, application of better solutions, new products, and services that meet new requirements and associated market needs. Innovation also embodies creativity and originality, which could be determined as achieving success. Motivation can be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic factors that drive people to take actions that achieve set targets. Specifically, extrinsic motivation comes from external rewards as a result of working on a task e.g. payroll. Intrinsic motivation comes from the pleasure derived from completing a task. These 3-critical business concept all interweave, and are equally of vital importance to Tesla’s success. Firstly, motivation has been the medium for initiating an energizing behavior to urge a person to achieve a goal in the business world. In a competitive job market, it isn’t sufficient to extrinsically motivate someone. In order to effectively motivate staff to achieve the best possible outcome, an employer’s social and psychological needs have to be considered. This can be obtained by intrinsically motivating someone, as Daniel Pink suggests. Innovation at Tesla is important for obvious reasons, saving the world from the suffocation of greenhouse gasses. Also, it provides a competitive advantage for such a present, competitive market. Another example is that it gives businesses an edge in penetrating markets faster and enables a better connection to developing markets. This can in turn lead to bigger opportunities (Henderson, 2017).

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