This course draws on a wide range of perspectives to explore the roots of long term competitive advantage in unusually successful firms. Using a combination of cases, simulations, readings and, most importantly, lively discussion, the course will explore the ways in which long term advantage is built from first mover advantage, increasing returns, and unique organizational competencies. We will focus particularly on the ways in which the actions of senior management build competitive advantage over time, and on the strategic implications of understanding the roots of a firm’s success.

This course offers analysis and practice of various forms of scientific and technical writing, from memos to journal articles, in addition to strategies for conveying technical information to specialist and non-specialist audiences. Comparable to 21W.780 Communicating in Technical Organizations, but methods in this course are designed to deal with special problems of advanced ELS or bilingual students. The goal of the workshop is to develop effective writing skills for academic and professional contexts. Models, materials, topics and assignments vary from term to term.

This course provides an introduction to bargaining and negotiation in public, business, and legal settings. It combines a “hands-on” skill-building orientation with a look at pertinent social theory. Strategy, communications, ethics, and institutional influences are examined as they influence the ability of actors to analyze problems, negotiate agreements, and resolve disputes in social, organizational, and political circumstances characterized by interdependent interests.

This course is conducted as an artificial intelligence programming contest in Java. Students work in teams to program virtual robots to play Battlecode, a real-time strategy game. Optional lectures are provided on topics and programming practices relevant to the game, and students learn and improve their programming skills experientially. The competition culminates in a live Battlecode tournament.
This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

This book uses a balanced blend of frameworks and illustrations to teach you how to tackle the challenge of driving performance into the future.

Kim Warren takes special care with this new textbook, Building Strategy and Performance, to ensure that it delivers instruction on how to deliver strategy powerfully over a sustained period of time.

This book helps you to show your students where the levers are that they can control and how to choose what to do, when, and how much to achieve their specific goals.

This book effectively outlines the dynamics of strategy, how one drives performance - past, today and into the future. It shows what causes performance to improve or deteriorate and what your students can do to change this trajectory for the better.

But don't take our word for it, review the book now to see if it can help you to deliver the kind of tactical strategy course you desire for your students.

This course explores successful approaches to delivering healthcare in challenging settings. We analyze organizations to find why some fall short while others grow in size and contribute to the health of the people they serve, and explore promising business models and social enterprise innovations.

This class looks at the birth and international expansion of an American industry of political marketing, with a special emphasis on Latin America. We will focus our attention on the cultural processes, sociopolitical contexts and moral utopias that shape the practice of political marketing in the U.S. and in different Latin American countries. By looking at the debates and expert practices at the core of the business of politics, we will explore how the “universal” concept of democracy is interpreted and reworked as it travels through space and time. Specifically, we will study how different groups experimenting with political marketing in different cultural contexts understand the role of citizens in a democracy.

This Module outlines Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), a strategy for helping students to improve their reading comprehension skills. In CSR, students work together in small groups to apply comprehension strategies as they read text from a content area, such as social studies or science (est. completion time: 1 hour).

China’s rise as a great power raises important questions about how that power might be used in its relations with other states. Nowhere are such questions more salient than in the future trajectory of China’s conflict behavior, including its approach to deterrence, crisis management and the use of force. To explore these important questions in China’s international relations, this seminar examines the evolution of Chinese strategic thought, in primary sources as well as its reflection in the interactions among Chinese states and between China and other states.

Class slides for Strategic Management are freely-available, screen-reader friendly, openly-licensed, and editable. The slides align with the freely-available open textbook, Strategic Management, which is the required text for Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business undergraduate capstone course, MGT 4394 Strategic Management. The collection includes eleven chapter-level .ppt slides with questions and activities, and additional slide decks with exercises and cases.

The open textbook, Strategic Management is freely available in PDF, ePub, Pressbooks, and other formats at http://hdl.handle.net/10919/99282

About the license Unless otherwise noted, the book, slides, and contents there in are licensed with a Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC BY NC SA) 3.0 license, which allows anyone to remix, tweak, and build upon the work for uses which are primarily non-commercial. New works must acknowledge the original work and must be licensed under the same CC BY NC SA 3.0 license. See Creative Commons' Best Practices for Attribution for further information: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution.

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Accessibility
Virginia Tech is committed to making its publications accessible in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. All figures within the slides have alternative text.

This work is published by Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business in association with the University Libraries' at Virginia Tech Open Education Initiative.

Contributors:
Management Faculty, Pamplin College of Business
Reed Kennedy
Eli Jamison
Other esteemed, former faculty from the Department of Management
University Libraries
Design and accessiblity: Kylie Call
Figure design and editorial: Kindred Grey
Project Management: Anita Walz

This course will conduct a comparative study of the grand strategies of the great powers (Britain, France, Germany and Russia) competing for mastery of Europe from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Grand strategy is the collection of political and military means and ends with which a state attempts to achieve security. We will examine strategic developments in the years preceding World Wars I and II, and how those developments played themselves out in these wars. The following questions will guide the inquiry: What is grand strategy and what are its critical aspects? What recurring factors have exerted the greatest influence on the strategies of the states selected for study? How may the quality of a grand strategy be judged? What consequences seem to follow from grand strategies of different types? A second theme of the course is methodological. We will pay close attention to how comparative historical case studies are conducted.

This article highlights the five essential components of cooperative learning, provides a quick overview of the research behind the strategy, describes three of the most common types, and offers ideas on how to get started using cooperative learning at the elementary level.

Using a website simulation tool, students build on their understanding of random processes on networks to interact with the graph of a social network of individuals and simulate the spread of a disease. They decide which two individuals on the network are the best to vaccinate in an attempt to minimize the number of people infected and "curb the epidemic." Since the results are random, they run multiple simulations and compute the average number of infected individuals before analyzing the results and assessing the effectiveness of their vaccination strategies.

Customer centricity is about organizational transformation making the customer the focus for business decisions, processes, product development, services, and procedures. Some companies purport to be customer centric but they fall short in connecting this concept throughout all functional areas of the business. While it is important to offer superb customer service, being customer centric is far more than that. It's about mapping the customer journey to discover customer needs and wants, what's working and what is not, then taking action to improve the customer experience. Customer loyalty is built through providing exceptional customer experiences. This in turn increases revenues through positive company image, referrals, and increased customer lifetime value. Most organizations today realize that they must focus on the customer to remain competitive.

DESIGN ROADMAPPING is for anyone interested in design, strategy and innovation, and its wonderful combinations. For those who dare to create a future vision, frame the time pacing and map the pathways towards it.

This guidebook teaches you how to create a roadmap. It outlines the origins, design theories and science results. Strategic designers, innovation managers and professors share their roadmapping experiences, views and achievements, including venture CPOs, Head of Design, product and program managers of international companies such as Canon, Peerby, Ferrari, Philips, Victoria State Library and many more.

By design roadmapping you devise creative responses to future strategic challenges. Guided by future foresight techniques, you uncover new trends, scout for new technologies and map the values and ideas on the roadmap. Through strong visualization, a design roadmap supports an organizational mindset on value innovations.

This course clarifies key marketing concepts, methods, and strategic issues relevant for start-up and early-stage entrepreneurs. At this course, there are two major questions:

Marketing Question: What and how am I selling to whom?
New Venture Question: How do I best leverage my limited marketing recourses?

Specifically, this course is designed to give students a broad and deep understanding of such topics as:

What are major strategic constraints and issues confronted by entrepreneurs today?
How can one identify and evaluate marketing opportunities?
How do entrepreneurs achieve competitive advantages given limited marketing resources?
What major marketing/sales tools are most useful in an entrepreneurial setting?

Because there is no universal marketing solution applicable to all entrepreneurial ventures, this course is designed to help students develop a flexible way of thinking about marketing problems in general.

This exercise is a research scavenger hunt for strategy, international business/management students to find the country that was assigned to their group by exploring various indices that introduce them to the elements of a country/PEST/institutional environments analysis. 

The globalization of the competitive landscape has forced companies to fundamentally rethink their strategies. Whereas once only a few industries such as oil could be labeled truly global, today many—from pharmaceuticals to aircraft to computers—have become global in scale and scope. As a consequence, creating a global competitive advantage has become a key strategic issue for many companies, and students need to possess an understanding of the impact of global strategies on a business.

Game theory enables rational insight into the basic principles of social interaction and has therefore become indispensable for economic and social sciences. Whether in politics, sports or medicine, modelling problems as a strategic game helps in decision-making in a variety of fields. With lecture snippets of Reinhard Selten, Robert Aumann and Alvin Roth, this Mini Lecture introduces to the mathematical beginnings of game theory, its socioscientific development and entrepreneurial integration.

This course provides practical instruction in the design and analysis of non-digital games. Students cover the texts, tools, references and historical context to analyze and compare game designs across a variety of genres, including sports, game shows, games of chance, card games, schoolyard games, board games, and role–playing games. In teams, students design, develop, and thoroughly test their original games to understand the interaction and evolution of game rules. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.