Defining the Organization's Strategic Direction

12 important questions on Defining the Organization's Strategic Direction

What are the 2 ways Porter's five-force model is used?

1. It is developed to asses industry attractiveness
2. In practice it is used to assess a specific firm's external environment

What is vertically integration?

Will lessen supplier bargaining power, and if the supplier can threaten to forward vertically integrate into the firm's business, this will increase the supplier's bargaining power.

If a firm's product is highly differentiated, how will buyers experience the bargaining power?

They will experience less bargaining power, and if the firm's product is undifferentiated, buyers will typically experience greater bargaining power.
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What are three things where a buyer typically experience a great bargaining power?

1. When the product is undifferentiated
2. The firm faces switching costs to work with other buyers
3. Backward vertically integrate

What are three important things to consider for complements?

1. How important complements are in the industry
2. Whether complements are differentially available for the products or various rivals
3. Who captures the value offered by the complements

What is meant with the term core competencies?

A core competency arises from a firm’s ability to combine and harmonize multiple primary abilities in which the firm excels into a few key building blocks of specialized expertise. Competencies often combine different kinds of abilities, such as abilities in managing the market interface (e.g., advertising, distribution), building and managing an effective infrastructure (e.g., information systems, logistics management), and technological abilities (e.g., applied science, process design).

What are 3 tests to identify the firm's core competencies?

1. Is it a significant source of competitive differentiation? Does it provide a unique signature to the organization? Does it make a significant contribution to the value a customer perceives in the end product?
2. Does it transcend a single business? Does it cover a range of businesses, both current and new?
3. Is it hard for competitors to imitate?

What are the 6 steps in order to identify the core competencies?

1. Start the program
2. Construct an inventory of capabilities
3. Asses capabilities
4. Identify candidate competencies
5. Test candidate core competencies
6. Evaluate the core competency position

What is the risk of core rigidities?

While these systems and norms can prove beneficial in reinforcing and leveraging the firm’s existing core competencies, they can also inhibit the development of new core competencies. Rewards for engaging in core competency activities can discour- age employees from pursuing more exploratory activities.

What is meant with dynamic capabilities?

It is also possible for a firm to develop core competencies that are not specific to any set of technologies or products, but rather to a set of abilities that enable it to quickly reconfigure its organizational structure and routines in response to new opportunities.

What are the conditions in order to be sustainable competitive advantage?

- Rare
- Valuable
- Durable
- Inimitable

What are difficult properties of a company to imitate?

- Tacit (cannot be codified or written down)
- Path-dependent (depending on history)
- Socially complex (resources that emerge through the interaction of multiple individuals)
- Causally ambiguous (it is unclear how the resource gives rise to value)

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