This module examines strategy from the inside of the firm by focusing on resources, capabilities, and organizational activities that shape competitive advantage. While external analysis highlights opportunities and threats, internal analysis explains why some firms can exploit those opportunities better than others. Learners will study how tangible and intangible resources are combined into capabilities, how value is created through activity systems, and why not all strengths lead to sustainable advantage. The module introduces core frameworks such as the Resource-Based View, VRIO logic, and value chain analysis, while emphasizing their practical limits. It also addresses how strengths and weaknesses should be interpreted dynamically, rather than as static attributes. By the end of the module, learners will understand that strategy depends not only on industry position, but also on the distinctive assets, routines, and coordination mechanisms inside the firm.

This module examines how firms create competitive advantage through strategic positioning. It explores how organizations choose where and how to compete by making trade-offs among activities and value propositions. The module introduces classic positioning logics such as cost leadership, differentiation, and focus strategies, and extends them to modern competitive contexts including hybrid strategies, experience-based differentiation, and platform markets. It also evaluates why some firms struggle with strategic clarity and how internal consistency across activities sustains advantage. Learners will understand both the power and the limits of positioning frameworks and how they must be adapted in dynamic and winner-take-all markets.

This module examines how industries evolve over time and how firms must time their strategic moves in relation to technological diffusion, market adoption, and competitive dynamics. It introduces key models of industry evolution, including S-curves, diffusion of innovations, hype cycles, and patterns of disruption, while critically assessing their strategic implications. Rather than treating technology as destiny, the module emphasizes managerial judgment in interpreting adoption signals, anticipating inflection points, and deciding when to invest, wait, or exit. Learners develop an analytically grounded view of timing as a strategic choice shaped by uncertainty, competition, and organizational capabilities.

This module examines how competition changes in platform-based markets characterized by network effects, multi-sided interactions, and increasing returns to scale. Learners explore why traditional competitive logic often breaks down in such settings and how platform dynamics can lead to winner-take-all or winner-take-most outcomes. The module analyzes strategic choices around platform design, pricing, openness, governance, and timing, as well as the risks of lock-in, tipping, and regulatory intervention. Emphasis is placed on understanding how platforms compete for ecosystems rather than customers alone, and why early advantages can become self-reinforcing.

This module examines how technological change reshapes strategic choice and industry structure. It focuses on technological paradigms, dominant designs, standards battles, first-mover advantages, and path dependence as mechanisms through which technology alters competition. Learners analyze why some technologies reorganize industries while others fail to do so, how firms compete to define standards, and why early technological commitments constrain later strategic options. Rather than treating technology as destiny, the module emphasizes strategic agency—how firms interpret, shape, and respond to technological change. The module builds analytical skill in evaluating when technology creates opportunity, when it locks firms into disadvantage, and how strategy must adapt as technological regimes evolve.

Corporate-level strategy addresses the fundamental question of firm scope: which activities and businesses a firm should own, combine, or separate. Unlike competitive strategy, which concerns how firms compete within markets, corporate strategy concerns where firms compete and how their portfolio of activities is structured. This module examines vertical integration and outsourcing, related and unrelated diversification, and the strategic logic of mergers and acquisitions. It also addresses the limits of expansion, including coordination costs, managerial overload, and value destruction from misguided scope choices. Through global examples, learners explore how firms expand or contract boundaries to create—or erode—long-term value.

This module examines how strategy must be designed and executed when firms compete across countries with different institutional, regulatory, and geopolitical environments. It moves beyond the idea of a single global market to focus on how national context shapes competitive advantage, risk, and strategic choice. Learners explore trade-offs between adaptation and standardization, the configuration of global value chains, the impact of geopolitical risk, and the management of cross-border asymmetries. The module emphasizes strategic judgment under global fragmentation, showing how firms achieve coherence while operating under diverse and often conflicting rules.

This module examines strategy as a governed, ongoing organizational process, not a one-time analytical exercise. It focuses on how strategic intent is translated into action through decision rights, alignment mechanisms, execution logic, and performance systems such as the Balanced Scorecard. Learners explore how leaders design governance structures that enable coordination, accountability, and adaptation over time. The module emphasizes strategic leadership in conditions of uncertainty, complexity, and change, highlighting how strategy must be continuously reviewed, renewed, and re-aligned as environments evolve. The focus is not leadership style, but how strategy is actually run inside organizations.