Stratégie

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.

Required and Corequired knowledge and skills

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

That said, students will be at in 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.

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).

Teaching notes to be posted by the course instructor

Contacts

Ehrig Timo <timo.ehrig@ulb.be>
 

Campus

Solbosch

Method(s) of evaluation

• written examination

written examination

Le titulaire se réserve le droit de convoquer tout étudiant.e à un entretien oral complémentaire afin de vérifier la maîtrise personnelle du contenu de l’examen remis.

Language(s) of evaluation

• english