Read pages 1-19 of the attached file (creating competitive advantage) Assignment: Your assignment is as follows. Explore, in a short essay, your own thoughts, ideas, and insights on the topic of the material in the focal class session in order to show your understanding of and reflection upon the topic. You should develop and support a thesis (“a proposition…put forward for consideration). Thus, your thought paper should be structured as an argument, and you should clearly articulate the key point of your argument (your thesis statement) and provide supporting claims/evidence for it. How to Think About the Assignment: Think about the assignment as follows. As you are reading the conceptual frameworks, think about what we mean by the key elements of the frameworks and how we have used them in the class. Consider the key takeaway from the session, whether the takeaway was surprising to you, and why it is important. Then think about what it might imply for firms and industries (outside of the focal firm/industry from the case), governments, and your prior work experiences or your future work context. What you write in the thought paper is up to you, as long as it builds on the conceptual framework in the relevant session. There are a number of approaches you might take. One approach is to apply part of the conceptual framework to some firm or industry (noting the “You May Not” comment below). For example, in a thought paper on the five forces, you might say “Industry X appears to be quite attractive in many respects, but in fact, its attractiveness is undermined by extremely high barriers to exit that lead to very high rivalry.” This would be your thesis statement. Then you would follow it up with arguments to support your claim. There are other approaches. For instance, you might disagree with something in the conceptual framework and then support your claim. I am open to a wide variety of approaches. My objective is to get you to think actively about the conceptual frameworks and how they might be applied. You May Not: You may not discuss the case from the class discussion in your thought paper. A class session is not a session about a case. Rather, a class session is about a conceptual framework and how to apply it to undertake effective analysis in order to make better decisions. The case discussion is one opportunity for you to learn how to use the conceptual framework – but the class is not about the case. Objective: My goal is to push you to think about the conceptual frameworks in an active manner (rather than reading them passively). I want to push you to apply what you learned to new and unfamiliar situations show that you can adapt your learning to fit many different settings, issues, and problems. When you practice and show that you can transfer knowledge, skills, and understandings, it means you understand the connection between the classroom and the real world. Simple reiteration of the readings, cases, or content of the class discussion is not sufficient and will be heavily penalized.
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