Course description
This course is about how to develop, tailor, and apply decision-making frameworks to real-world strategy problems. It complements standard strategy courses in a number of important ways. Whereas standard strategy courses typically provide conceptual approaches to formulate strategies to establish sustainable competitive advantage, we focus on short- to medium-term margin improvement. The majority of the course content focuses on hands-on tools and frameworks that help strategic and marketing managers formulate strategy to obtain short- to medium-term advantages rather than long-term competitive advantage. In standard strategy courses a number of theoretically sound frameworks of analysis are introduced. This course builds on them, but focuses on questions such as: which framework is relevant for what problem? What are the key operational steps to approach a strategy problem (such as entry into a market), and how does one tailor them to the specific company and industry situation? In standard strategy case-based courses, students typically learn to provide strategic solutions from given case information, whereas a real-world strategy problem often has a blank sheet as a starting point. This course addresses the following questions: how do we gather the right information to address a strategic issue, given real-world informational constraints? How do we process that information for improved decision making?
