“Why do some companies outperform others?” That question is particularly important to ask in industries which are fiercely competitive like the tech sector. Companies competing in these industries find it difficult to achieve competitive advantage and sustain it over the longer run. In this course, you will learn about 21st century competition, the forces driving it, and the challenges it poses for companies.
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Using that as the backdrop, you will learn how to analyze a company's external and internal environments and develop powerful strategies that allow companies to gain a sustainable competitive advantage even in fast-cycle markets. The course will describe companies that have successfully outperformed their competitors even in the fiercely competitive markets of the 21st century.
After completing this course, you will be able to:
- Describe what a competitive strategy is and how it is formulated.
- Analyze the macro-environmental factors and identify opportunities and threats.
- Analyze industry forces and draw conclusions about the industry’s profitability.
- Describe the concept of competitive advantage and its importance.
- Describe the circumstances under which competitive advantage is sustainable.
- Analyze the value chain and understand its contribution to competitive advantage.
- Explain how companies compete on price using a cost leadership strategy.
- Describe how companies compete on their unique features using a differentiation strategy.
- Explain how companies can offer both low prices and unique features simultaneously.
- Describe how to choose a value-creating competitive strategy.
What you'll learn
- Analysis of a company's opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses.
- Different types of competitive strategies and how to choose them.
- How do today's companies achieve long term success and profitability.
Syllabus
Module 1: What is Competitive Strategy?
Welcome to Competitive Strategy. In this course, we will cover the topics of: What is Competitive Strategy?, Competitive Advantage, and Choosing a Competitive Strategy. The 21st century competitive landscape is characterized by rapid technological change, increasing globalization, and intense competition. To succeed in such a challenging environment, companies need to have an effective competitive strategy to be successful over the long run. We will begin the process of developing such a strategy in this module by analyzing external factors that impact a company's performance. We will learn how to identify opportunities and threats in the macro-environment and to analyze forces that affect an industry's profitability. After completing this module, you will have a clear understanding of what competitive strategy is and how to analyze the external environment.
Module 2: Competitive Advantage
In this module, you will learn what competitive advantage is and how companies can generate it with a good competitive strategy. Competitive advantage is the firm’s ability to generate greater Economic Value Created (EVC), which is the difference between the maximum price customers are willing to pay for the company’s products or services (WTP) and the firm’s cost of producing and selling the product (COST), than the competitor’s EVC. The company’s internal resources help create competitive advantage when deployed with an effective strategy to exploit opportunities in the external environment. You will learn that certain resources which are valuable, rare, inimitable, and for which the company is well organized to exploit, can lead to sustainable or longer-term competitive advantage – which in turn drives long-term profitability. Finally, you will learn how to analyze the value chain activities and understand how they help generate competitive advantage. At the end of the module, you will learn how to analyze internal resources, how companies generate sustainable competitive advantage, and understand the role of the value chain.
Module 3: Choosing a Competitive Strategy
This module describes the different competitive strategies like differentiation, cost leadership, and best-cost strategy. You will understand how companies use these approaches to create a superior EVC and enjoy a sustainable competitive advantage. Differentiation strategies generally focus on increasing the WTP while Cost Leadership strategies stress reducing COST. Best-cost strategy aims to increase WTP and reduce COST simultaneously. You will also learn how to do the SWOT analysis by comparing external opportunities and threats with internal strengths and weaknesses. You will learn how a company can develop an optimal competitive strategy by matching internal strengths with external opportunities. Using a fictitious mini case, you will learn how the external analysis in Module 1 and internal analysis in Module 2 all come together to help companies identify an optimal competitive strategy. At the end of Module 3, you will learn the various competitive strategy alternatives available to companies, how they lead to competitive advantage, and how a company could identify the optimal competitive strategy for a given situation.
Summative Course Assessment
This module contains the summative course assessment that has been designed to evaluate your understanding of the course material and assess your ability to apply the knowledge you have acquired throughout the course. Be sure to review the course material thoroughly before taking the assessment.
