Business Courses
In this course you will learn how organizations create, capture, and maintain value, and how it is fundamental for sustainable competitive advantage. You will be able to better understand value creation and capture, and learn the tools to analyze both competition and cooperation from a variety of perspectives, including the industry level (e.g., five forces analysis), and the firm level (e.g., business models and strategic positioning).
• Understand how managers coordinate different functional areas, resources, and systems inside a company and align them with the external environment to enhance overall performance
• Knowledge of strategic management tools and frameworks, and apply them to real business contexts Process diverse business and industry information to diagnose strategic issues, evaluate strategic alternatives, and formulate a coherent and actionable strategic plan
• How to think like a CEO, entrepreneur, or general manager.
Course Orientation
You will become familiar with the course, your classmates, and our learning environment. The orientation will also help you obtain the technical skills required for the course.
Module 1: Leading Strategically
The Leading Strategically module will lay the foundation of business strategy course. You will learn about mission, vision and values and their role in overall strategy landscape. You will learn about the VARS framework for analyzing business models and SWOT framework for understanding the fit and coherence of business strategy.
Module 2: External Analysis
The Environmental Analysis module will focus on a key aspect of business strategy – analyzing and understanding the external environment of a firm. You will learn about the macro-environment of firms and the PESTEL framework for macro-environmental analysis. You will also learn about firms’ industry environment and understand how to predict industry profitability by using the 5-forces framework.
Module 3: Internal Analysis and Competitive Advantage
The module on Internal Analysis and Competitive Advantage will provide an in-depth understanding of the origins of unique company strengths and how they can produce a competitive advantage. You will learn about the origins and consequences of fundamental internal differences among firms using the analytical viewpoints of activities, resources, and capabilities. You will be introduced to the strategic tools of value chains, value networks, and the V-R-I framework to help you analyze the implications of these within-firm differences for (sustained) competitive advantage.
Module 4: Strategic Positioning and Strategic Renewal
The Strategic Positioning and Strategic Renewal module brings together the internal and external aspects of strategic analysis to formulate an overall strategy for the firm. You will learn about the two main “generic strategies” that businesses can pursue, which can be complemented by broad or narrow scope to yield four key types of strategic positioning. You will also learn about “dual” strategies and why and how a firm’s strategy must be adapted to strategically renew its positioning.
Pros
- You have access to the best teacher in nearly any field.
- With Coursetalk (mooc rating), you can see if a course is really awesome
- There are usually lots of information about what will the course be about
- You can drop out anytime (this allow you to quickly test lots of course)
- It somehow desmistify the hardness of world first university. (the course are hard, for sure, but the teacher are daam good)
- It’s basically free
Cons
- Course are usually based on video, which mean, you need a good Internet connection, but most importantly, it has its own pace. It miss an handout.
- You always sign up for a long adventure. Sometimes, you just want to see the basics of a domain, not to prepare yourself to become an expert.
- It miss peer to peer collaboration. The forum is great, but it’s often a small minority who participate