Technology Strategy: Creative Destruction

Overview

Class Central Tips

The success of modern companies depends critically on their ability to manage and respond to technological change. Innovation is continually challenging companies’ competitive advantages, giving rise to new business models, and stimulating new platform-based competition. Managers and entrepreneurs need to understand these strategic forces and how they impact firms and industries in the modern knowledge economy. This course explains how technological innovation affects the competitive dynamics of markets, and how managers and entrepreneurs alike can strategically manage these dynamics to maximize the likelihood of success. Drawing on many years of research, this course teaches various tools, concepts, and analytical frameworks that help to characterize and analyze strategic problems arising from innovation and technological change. It also offers appropriate strategic responses that managers and entrepreneurs can implement to achieve market leadership for their companies. In a nutshell, this course seeks to help managers and entrepreneurs navigate through the “gales of creative destruction” (a term coined by the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter) unleashed by technological innovation.

Syllabus

MODULE 1: LIFE CYCLES OF INNOVATION

In this module, we will focus on the fundamentals of how innovation creates regular patterns in industries and markets over time.

MODULE 2: TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION

In this module, we will understand the fascinating phenomenon of technological disruption – why is it that well-established leading companies are (sometimes) threatened and displaced when they face a new emerging technology?

MODULE 3: BUSINESS MODEL INNOVATION

In this module, we will engage in a detailed discussion on business models and the various components of a business model.

MODULE 4: STANDARDS AND PLATFORMS

In this module, we explore a major new development in the technology-led business landscape: the emergence of competition based on standards and platforms.