Strategy

Competences and skills that will be acquired during the course. This course, as a companion to "International Management", addresses key issues in developing and implementing international strategies that create value across borders. Companies today confront an increasing array of choices regarding geographic markets, locations for key activities, ways of organizing international business, and processes for managing across borders. The aim of the subject is to prepare students to manage effectively in today´s interconnected world by understanding the changing environment, principles of global strategy, and the relationship between global strategy and organization. The key learning objectives are the following: 1 Recognizing when a company's competitive advantage can be leveraged more effectively on a global playing field. 2 Learning how to develop strategies for international growth and global value creation: adaptation, aggregation, arbitrage. 3 Understanding the tradeoffs in organizing for global competition. Deciding how the organizational design can best support specific global strategy choices. What structures, systems, and processes are needed to manage a company's international strategy? Are global efficiencies best created through a centralized structure or a local organizational units that foster innovation and flexibility? 4 Evaluating which strategic activities to own and which to execute through alliances or outsourcing, and when to engage in offshoring. Evaluating the challenges related to implementation of outsourcing and offshoring in the value chain. 5 Learning how to identify institutional voids and develop non-market strategies to manage the firm within a weaker or less formalized institutional environment.

Through a combination of case discussion, presentations, readings and lectures, you will develop your ability to pursue managerial action that is responsive to the evolving global business environment. We will apply a number of simple frameworks to analyze the global business environment and institutional environment, assess the value adding opportunities of global strategies, devise the location and ownership choice for international expansion of the value chain, as well as discuss the implications for structuring the organizations when pursuing internationalization. Throughout the course, we will analyze a number of cases from varied industry contexts including consumer electronics, wine, toys, food wholesale, and management consulting, which come from varied country context including developed and emerging markets and cover various economic cycles. With this industry, country and time variation, students will have a broad range of case experience for developing skills in formulating and evaluating global strategies that are realistic and founded on the specific characteristics of the situation at hand.

To accomplish our objectives, we use a variety of learning techniques: 1) Class Participation Heavy emphasis will be placed on participation in class and case discussion. Your active participation will be essential for your own learning and that of the other participants in the class. 2) Group Presentations At the beginning of the semester you will be asked to form groups of 3-4 members to meet and discuss cases studies and readings prior to class meetings. - At the end of the course you will deliver a group presentation in which you will apply the key frameworks from this course to analyse international expansion of a firm of your choice. 3) Final Exam The written exam will be based on the readings and the cases.