Strategic management

Increasing and maintaining profitability requires you to provide unique value to consumers while protecting yourself from competitive threats. Developing a successful strategy requires identifying and planning for specific challenges in your market to avoid costly mistakes, take advantage of new opportunities, and increase long-term profits. In this course, you'll learn a number of real-world examples and effective frameworks to help you strengthen your strategy and profitability. You'll analyze how your organization is currently creating value, and strategically focus on how best to create new value for target customers beyond what competitors are offering. You will conduct an in-depth analysis of competitive threats to your company's profitability, allowing you to both identify threats in your current market and assess the prospects for profitability in other markets you might enter.

Good strategy does not exist in isolation: a company's success and profitability depends not only on its strategic actions, but also on the strategic actions of other companies. Understanding the strategic linkages between firms can therefore be extremely valuable. Game theory is a tool specifically designed to analyse and exploit these strategic links between the actions of different firms. You will explore the market and identify the key players in your industry. After identifying the key players, you will analyze their capabilities and motivations. You will take into account the physics of business when mapping actions and reactions to strategic moves. In addition, you will examine how other players perceive you and devise ways to influence those views to your advantage.

A business with an innovative culture doesn't just happen. You have to plan for both financial success and cultural change. There are several types and approaches to innovation. How do you create an innovation strategy for your business? In this part of the course you will start to create an innovation strategic plan. You will identify your organization's goals and align your innovation strategy with them. You will grow an executive champion and set SMART goals for your new product, service or technology. You identify risks and barriers to deployment and create plans to mitigate them. Along the way, you'll hear case studies from large and small, private and government, established and start-up organizations in a variety of fields that have successfully implemented an innovation strategy with sustainable positive impacts on their bottom line.

You've developed an innovation strategy and established a vision, SMART goals and outcome measures. You've identified competencies such as lean startup, makerspace and design thinking, and selected tools to build an innovation culture. Now you will learn how to implement your strategy. After you map your key internal stakeholders, you design a campaign plan for your strategy and assemble a dedicated team. You'll understand the different motivations of your innovation shop and "performance engine" and learn how to work effectively with members of the performance engine team.

The digital environment is still an important part of an organisation's success. For organizations centered around digital technologies, it is important to develop a digital strategy that addresses the specific opportunities and challenges that arise in digital ecosystems. This includes leveraging the potential to become a digital platform or leveraging existing digital platforms from complementary organizations. How can you harness the power of digital platforms to grow your organisation and maximise profitability? In this part of the study, you will therefore assess the state of digital platforms in the current market. You will use this assessment to identify network effects that your organization can leverage and harness to increase the value of your products and services in the marketplace. Once you have identified the state of platforms and network effects, you will develop a digital platform strategy to grow and sustain your digital strategy, especially if your organization can create its own digital platform. Finally, you will explore best practices for interacting with digital platforms created by other organizations and develop a strategy for selecting and interacting with a platform created outside your organization.

In this part of the course you will assess the status of your business relationships through a comprehensive assessment process. The analysis will allow you to better understand the importance of each relationship to your value creation efforts and how your organization would be impacted if the relationship were to go wrong. You will then clarify expectations of both sides of the relationship, potential opportunities that are not being taken advantage of, goals for mutual success, and what to watch out for in the future. Armed with this knowledge, you will be ready to develop a strategy for improving and maintaining the health of key business relationships through an action plan specifically tailored to the needs of each relationship.