Key Information
About the content
Maintaining a competitive advantage takes more than great timing or a single solution. Sustainable advantage requires a well-designed and well-executed strategy. This course was created to give you the tools and frameworks you need to develop and execute a successful strategy.
You’ll learn how to evaluate your own strategy, as well as how to locate sources of potential competitive advantage from a perspective that encompasses the internal, external, and dynamic fit of your strategy. You’ll also learn how to enhance your ability to assess the strategic impact of the moves of your competitors and how to maintain competitive advantage, understand the general drivers that create and sustain competitive advantage, and how to identify organizational barriers to change.
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to assess and redesign your current strategy and develop plans for effective implementation to give your firm a competitive advantage.
- Evaluate your strategic environment in the present and the future
- Identify the differences between organizational effectiveness and strategic positioning
- Map core and supporting activities of your firm and how they interact with each other
- Locate organizational barriers to strategy implementation and organizational change
- Engage in a strategic planning process that works
Prerequisite
- Familiarity with basic business concepts
- This is a graduate level course
Syllabus
Module 1: Analyze your firm’s internal fit
- What is strategy?
- The difference between organizational effectiveness and strategy
- The importance of tradeoffs
- The value chain
- Interactions among strategic choices
- Mapping your firm’s activity system
Module 2: Analyze your firm’s external fit
- The concept of “value”
- Industry analysis
- Willingness-to-pay and cost drivers for different customer segments
- Your value proposition
- Strategic Positioning
Module 3: Maintaining your firm’s dynamic fit
- The origins of your firm’s strategy
- Drivers of strategy evolution
- Barriers to organizational change (perception, knowledge, motivation, and coordination challenges)
- Disruptive technological changes
Module 4: Creating new strategies and initiatives
- Creating new strategic possibilities
- Identifying conditions for success for each possibility
- Designing empirical tests
- Selecting strategic possibilities
- Important shifts in mindsets
Instructors
Nicolaj Siggelkow
David M. Knott Professor of Management
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Content Designer
Platform
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This course has lived up to the Wharton name in terms of content. Although I'd suggest that it should be taken in groups and perhaps on a different platform (outside of the free trial), to really benefit from the exercises and cases presented. Nevertheless, the richness of the content is undeniable and of course, its potential.
This course has lived up to the Wharton name in terms of content. Although I'd suggest that it should be taken in groups and perhaps on a different platform (outside of the free trial), to really benefit from the exercises and cases presented. Nevertheless, the richness of the content is undeniable and of course, its potential.
