Welcome back to our course on protecting business innovations via strategy. In our last two modules, we've talked about strategy as basic concepts, introducing you to the ideas of strategy. How can you protect your business using strategy? In module one, we talked about building a fortress, using strategy to build a defensible, sustainable position to gain an advantage that is able to overcome assaults from competitors, and threats from the outside. And that's sort of a static view of strategy. In module two or in the next module, we talked about strategy as a dynamic force, running fast to stay ahead, a kind of PanzerBlitz view of strategy in a military context, or Patent in Europe in World War II, moving fast with the tanks. And so it's not about having the right defensible position, but about being faster than the opponent and using strategy in a different way. And so those are two different views of strategy and this session we're going to apply those concepts or basic ideas to a new world. And we're going to look at a new world, a world of e-commerce, a world of commerce online. And we're going to look at ideas of strategy and law and government and regulation and how it applies in an e-commerce world. Now this is important because many of the innovative firms out there in the world, many innovations that we want to protect are moving online. More and more of our world, more and more of our commerce is moving into an online space. And e-commerce doesn't have the same protections, the same rules, or the same constraints as traditional brick and mortar-based businesses. And so that's a different view of the world. Now, another different view might be your view of your professor. You might notice that something is a little bit different about my appearance today than was the case in the last two modules. Maybe you didn't notice. But if you did, you may notice that I didn't shave this morning and therefore I look a little bit different. And so in our discussions as a class, I'm going to ask you to vote and share your opinion. Which do you like better? Which do you think looks better for a professor, to have a beard or to be clean shaven? I'm the same person. I can go either way, but I'd love to get your feedback on that. Now in this case, coming back from holiday, I really didn't feel like shaving and I needed to record. So I came up with a justification that's creative of why this makes some sense. We're thinking about a world, it's a new world in a new way with a new perspective. And anyway, in this module, we are going to be talking about a couple of things related to e-commerce. Everything is going to be focused on e-commerce. We're going to start by talking about e-commerce in a global context, and how does that interact with governments, or with laws? Because a lot of protecting innovation is using law to help us protect innovation. In cyberspace, that gets a little bit tricky. By cyberspace what I mean is, in the traditional world we speak of protecting firms in their marketplace. Their marketplace being the country or context of environment in which they're competing in marketing. And so you'd look at the 4 Ps for example in a marketing course in the marketplace. But online, in a cyber world or an online world, we speak often of cyberspace. And so I'll use that term. I'm introducing it to you now, which is not a very complicated term. It just means doing business online. But so in that cyber space context, which is your competition environment or your marketplace in the online world, you do interact with governments in ways that may surprise you. So with that I'm going to talk about cyber law and what does that mean and how does it work? I'm then going to talk about the cyberspace environment of two very different perspectives of types of companies, elephants and mice. Elephants are firms that are big and strong, like an elephant. They have resource-based advantages. They have economies of scale. They have brands, they have loyalty, they have access to suppliers. They have everything that would make you proud from our first module perspective of building a fortress. But they're also fast. Elephants are big, but they're not that slow, they're not like tortoises or anything, an elephant can move reasonably fast. And so you can have firms that are both fast, moderately nimble, fairly nimble and powerful, and you would say that's everything we want in strategy. But they have a downside. They're easy to see, they're easy to detect, and they're easy to sue. And so there's a liability of being big. There's a disadvantage of being big. That is that lawyers know where to find you, and governments know where tax you, or know where to constrain you, and so there's a downside of being big. Then there's also some advantage of being small, like a mouse, and so we'll talk about that. And we'll use that as an analogy to big firms and small firms. And how they are affected differently by government's regulation rules of the game, and how mice have some advantages in some ways. We'll give you some examples of that. We'll then look at contracts online and how they're different in many cases than contracts in physical, face to face world. And terms and conditions and why that's important and why you need to think a little bit differently about that than you do in traditional marketplaces. So this will be our overview. This is our overview of where we're going in this e-commerce module as part of our protecting business innovations via strategy course. Thank you very much. We look forward to seeing you on our next session. 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