What is strategy?
Skillful management directed towards attaining an end.
What is strategic analysis?
A process companies do to study and understand the different parts of their competitive environment.
What is environmental scanning?
Analyzing both a company’s internal state and its external environment.
What are the 5 P’s of strategy?
(llaoe)
- Plan: forces businesses to chart out objectives.
- Ploy: a tactic to gain advantages over competition.
- Pattern: a repetition in actions or behaviours.
- Position: the position that a business is in the market.
- Perspective: how the business acts.
What are external factors in the competitive environment?
Factors from outside the company that affect their success, such as rises in interest rates and natural disasters.
What are internal factors in the competitive environment?
Characteristics of the company itself, including employees, equipment, operations, and processes.
What is competitive advantage?
Providing greater value for customers than competitors.
What is sustainable competitive advantage?
A competitive advantage that other companies have tried to overcome but cannot. due to a companies resources.
What is the strategy making process? (ACC)
- Assess the need for strategic change.
- Conduct a situational analysis.
- Choose strategic alternatives.
What does SWOT stand for?
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
What does a firm’s internal environment consist of?
Employees, investors, and assets the firm has.
What are the 4 things a firm must have in its resources to build an advantage (VIRN)
Valuable, Imperfectly imitable, Rare, Non-substitutable.
What is structural change?
The change in overall relationships within the organization.
What is technological change?
The implementation of new technologies, usually forced upon an organization as the environment shifts.
What is cultural change?
The common patterns of thinking and behaving within an organization.
What are the 4 stages of the organizational life cycle? (SGMD)
- Startup: the business is new, no real structures in place.
- Growth: meeting other businesses, growing.
- Maturity: efficient, making profit.
- Decline: if the business doesn’t change for the better.
What is the difference between change and innovation?
Change: any alteration in existing circumstances.
Innovation: successful implementation of creative ideas in an organization.
What is the tech cycle?
A cycle that begins with the birth of new tech and ends when the tech reaches its limit and is replaced by newer tech.
What is the S-curve pattern of innovation?
A pattern of tech innovation characterized by slow initial progress, then rapid progress, and then slow progress again.
Why does innovation matter?
Companies that want to sustain a competitive advantage must understand and protect themselves from strategic threats of innovation.
What are innovation streams?
Patterns of innovation over time that can create sustainable competitive advantage.
What is technological discontinuity?
A scientific advance or a unique combination of existing tech creates a significant breakthrough in performance or function.
What is the risk of not changing?
Organizational decline: a large decrease in organizational performance.
What are the five stages of organizational decline? (bifcd)
- Blinded: not realizing change is needed.
- Inaction: noticing change but not acting.
- Faulty action: poor decisions made.
- Crisis: struggling financially.
- Dissolution: everything is lost.
