Business Strategy from Wharton: Competitive Advantage

Maintaining a competitive advantage takes more than great timing or a single solution. Sustainable advantage requires a well-designed and well-executed strategy. This course was created to give you the tools and frameworks you need to develop and execute a successful strategy.

You’ll learn how to evaluate your own strategy, as well as how to locate sources of potential competitive advantage from a perspective that encompasses the internal, external, and dynamic fit of your strategy. You’ll also learn how to enhance your ability to assess the strategic impact of the moves of your competitors and how to maintain competitive advantage, understand the general drivers that create and sustain competitive advantage, and how to identify organizational barriers to change.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to assess and redesign your current strategy and develop plans for effective implementation to give your firm a competitive advantage.

Module 1: Analyze your firm’s internal fit

• What is strategy?
• The difference between organizational effectiveness and strategy
• The importance of tradeoffs
• The value chain
• Interactions among strategic choices
• Mapping your firm’s activity system

Module 2: Analyze your firm’s external fit

• The concept of “value”
• Industry analysis
• Willingness-to-pay and cost drivers for different customer segments
• Your value proposition
• Strategic Positioning

Module 3: Maintaining your firm’s dynamic fit

• The origins of your firm’s strategy
• Drivers of strategy evolution
• Barriers to organizational change (perception, knowledge, motivation, and coordination challenges)
• Disruptive technological changes

Module 4: Creating new strategies and initiatives

• Creating new strategic possibilities
• Identifying conditions for success for each possibility
• Designing empirical tests
• Selecting strategic possibilities
• Important shifts in mindsets