Advanced Strategy

• Introduction & recap of strategy basics (industry analysis, competitive advantage, business definition, portfolio management)
• Deep dives on sustainability, innovation, M&A, platforms & ecosystems, and transformation & turnaround, strategy implementation & conclusion
• Illustrate key concepts & theories through interactive case studies

• Understand strategy as a theory: a causal logic describing how a desired future can be created.
• Understand how entrepreneurs and challenger firms can engage incumbents and other stakeholders on their view of the future to attract resources.
• Understand the forces that will drive value capture. Project how value will migrate, given assumptions encoded in a theory.

Students will learn the economic principles underlying key strategic decisions of business firms and organizations. Particular emphasis will be given to sustainability questions along with anticipating change in value networks, experimentation, and explaining how former industry outsiders disrupt industries. Moreover, students will learn to formulate strategies (for instance, of their start-up ideas) as theories, and how to test these theories.

Required and Corequired knowledge and skills

The course is suitable for all students who got accepted into the Master of Business engineering program, and curiosity for the topic of strategy (and, ideally, interest in the development of the strategy of their own initiative or start-up idea) is more important than any theoretical preparation.

That said, students will be at an advantage if they are familiar with basic economic concepts for business decision-making that are typically covered in introductory courses in microeconomics and/or industrial organization: average and marginal costs, economies of scale, competition, and strategic interaction.

Prof. Faelli’s part: Advanced Strategy part

Strategy is not engineering. There are often not unique answers to strategic problems. Rather, strategy is a practice. It should therefore be taught through case studies. All lectures are anchored on a concrete case study, primarily leveraging the very large Harvard Business School case library. Case studies are prepared before class and discussed live. Thus, the course will rely on a mix of theoretical analysis (guided by the textbook and the teaching notes) and in-depth case studies to be discussed in class.

This is complemented by slides and strategy frameworks, with one reference book: Grant's Contemporary Strategy Analysis (now in its 11th edition).

Prof. Ehrig’s part: Theory-Based View and Value Capture Theory

Strategy is increasingly cast as a science. Recent studies show that strategists who act like scientists and test and revise hypotheses systematically outperform strategist who don’t. Thus, we will learn how to formulate theories as hypothesis about the future, and how to systematically test them. We will also learn how to calculate anticipated profits, in particular, how assumptions about disruptive forces will change anticipated profits. To make this exciting, we will work with real-time cases and apply these tools to yet-unsettled strategic problems.

References, bibliography, and recommended reading

Grant, Robert M. Contemporary strategy analysis. John Wiley & Sons, 2021. (core reading for the class!)

Ehrig, T. and Schmidt, J., 2022. Theory‐based learning and experimentation: How strategists can systematically generate knowledge at the edge between the known and the unknown. Strategic Management Journal, 43(7), pp.1287-1318.

Felin, T. & Zenger, T. 2017. The theory-based view: Economic actors as theorists. Strategy Science, 2(4), 258-271.

Porter, M. E. "1980 Competitive strategy. New York: Free Press." (1980).

Wernerfelt, B., 2022. When Does the Underdog Win?. Strategy Science, 7(1), pp.1-9.
 

Contacts

Ehrig Timo <timo.ehrig@ulb.be>
Faelli, Francois <francois.faelli@bain.com>

Campus

Solbosch

Method(s) of evaluation

• written examination

written examination

The Prof. Faelli’s part (Advanced Strategy) exam will be a written exam held during the May/June session made of

• Multiple-choice
• Short open questions
• Short essay based on a press clipping

The Prof. Ehrig’s part (Theory-Based View and Value Capture Theory) exam will be will be a written exam held during the May/June session

Mark calculation method (including weighting of intermediary marks)

Students will receive a grade out of 20 for both parts of the class:
(1) Prof. Faelli’s part (Advanced Strategy) and
(2) Prof. Ehrig’s part

• If both grades are 10/20 or above, the final mark is the average of the two grades.
• If either grade is below 10/20, only the failed grade is counted as the final mark. Students must therefore pass both components to pass overall.
• If either part is failed in the first session (June), the student must retake that part at the August resit. The grade of the part passed successfully (≥10/20) in the first session will be carried over in the second session.
• If either part is still failed after the August resit, the student will need to retake the full course the following academic year.

Language(s) of evaluation

• english