What drives sustainable competitive advantage in business? This specialization introduces a distinctive approach to business strategy centered on value creation and competitive advantage. Using Harvard Business School Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee’s Value Stick framework, learners examine how organizations create value, shape customer willingness to pay, and build advantages that competitors find difficult to replicate.
Across two courses, learners explore how firms create and capture value, make strategic pricing decisions, and leverage complements and ecosystems to strengthen competitive performance. Through examples from companies across technology, retail, entertainment, and financial services, learners develop practical tools to analyze business opportunities, evaluate strategic tradeoffs, and assess the sources of long-term competitive advantage.
Applied Learning Project
Across the specialization, learners apply strategy frameworks to realistic business challenges through scenario-based exercises, strategic analyses, and decision-making activities. They evaluate customer value, pricing and value-capture opportunities, ecosystem and complement strategies, and emerging competitive threats, developing recommendations that address authentic managerial problems faced by business leaders.
