Business Commons^™

Pizza, Pizza, Pizza: A Competitive Strategy Exercise, Norman T. Sheehan

Organization Management Journal

While business students are typically comfortable identifying and extrapolating trends uncovered during competitive analyses, they often fail to take the Red Queen Effect into account when formulating new competitive strategies. This competitive strategy exercise employs Kim and Mauborgne’s (2005) strategy canvas to help students to anticipate rivals’ potential reactions and then develop new competitive strategies for firms competing in highly competitive markets. The exercise concludes with key takeaways as to how students may best develop and evaluate new competitive strategies. Student feedback indicates that students found the exercise useful, as 97% of students (n = 69) recommended that instructors at …

How Do Firms Become Different? A Dynamic Model, Matthew Selove

Business Faculty Articles and Research

This paper presents a dynamic investment game in which firms that are initially identical develop assets that are specialized to different market segments. The model assumes that there are increasing returns to investment in a segment, for example, as a result of word-of-mouth or learning curve effects. I derive three key results: (1) Under certain conditions there is a unique equilibrium in which firms that are only slightly different focus all of their investment in different segments, causing small random differences to expand into large permanent differences. (2) If, on the other hand, sufficiently large random shocks are possible, firms …

Competitive Priorities And Strategic Consensus In Emerging Economies: Evidence From India, Ravi Kathuria, Stephen J. Porth, N. N. Kathuria, T. K. Kohli

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to understand the competitive priorities of manufacturers in India, and examine the level of agreement or strategic consensus between senior executives and manufacturing managers on manufacturing competitive priorities in light of the prevalent culture.

Design/methodology/approach

– Survey data collected from 156 respondents from 78 manufacturing units based on a national sample in India are used to test the hypotheses using the paired samples t‐tests and multivariate analysis of variance.

Findings

– A relatively high emphasis by both levels of managers on quality, compared to the other three competitive priorities, is noteworthy and …