STRT-609 Advanced Competitive Strategy

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The goal of the course is to develop your skills in analyzing strategic situations and formulating firm strategy. The emphasis is upon the role of resources and capabilities in creating competitive advantage for the firm. We draw upon the “resource-based view of the firm”—an approach to strategy that views the firm as a collection of resources and capabilities and analyzes how these resources and capabilities create and sustain competitive advantage. This approach is especially relevant to companies competing in markets subject to intense competition and rapid rates of change. In such markets, a company’s internal capabilities can offer a more secure basis on which to define long-term strategy than external customer focus.
The course builds upon your core strategic management course and extends the part that dealt with the internal analysis of the firm. Our emphasis will be upon identifying and appraising the resources and organizational capabilities of the firm, exploring the relationship between resources and capabilities, and examining how organizational capabilities are created and developed. We shall give particular attention to those resources and capabilities required for competitive advantage in knowledge-based industries—this will take us into issues of knowledge management and competition for technical standards. Finally, we shall look at some of the new ideas that are reshaping current thinking about strategic management and organizational design.
The course takes us to the frontiers of strategic management. For all the talk about “deploying our competencies and capabilities to build sustainable competitive advantage,” few companies have any clear idea about what their competencies and capabilities are, or what their role is in conferring superior performance. In order to understand why some firms perform certain tasks better than others and how a firm can develop particular capability we will need to explore the fundamentals of collaboration, organization, and the deployment of effort.
The course is intended for those who will be involved with strategic management whether as general managers, management consultants, or strategic planning / business development specialists. The course is also relevant to those in more functionally-specific roles who need strong strategic skills (e.g. brand managers, corporate financiers, MIS managers, investment analysts).

Credits: 1.75

Prerequisites: MBA STUDENTS ONLY

Other academic years
There is information about this course number in other academic years:

• 2005-2006 Fall and Spring
• 2006-2007 Fall and Spring
• 2007-2008 Fall and Spring
• 2009-2010 Fall and Spring
• 2010-2011 Fall and Spring
• 2011-2012 Fall and Spring
• 2012-2013 Fall and Spring
• 2013-2014 Fall and Spring

More information
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