If you are interested in reading about how and why powerful incumbent firms fail to define their industry, the article on Marketing Myopia by Levitt is a good one. First published in 1960, it still holds relevance today and here is one written almost 15 years later as a review. But you can see its relevance even today–VOIP changing cable companies to being Content/Internet providers, PC Games changing the landscape leading to and Interactive Entertainment industry instead of Video game, movie, plays etc, and medical devices and drugs converging to form the Life sciences industry instead of the pharmaceutical, device, biologic industries.
http://www.casadogalo.com/marketingmyopia.pdf
This class we will look at Industry Analysis and go through a checklist for doing Industry Analysis in the Automobile Industry. We will look at how we should define our Industry, whose perspective should we take and how should we analyze the Five Forces in this Industry. Since this is a fairly well known Industry, it is easy to identify suppliers, buyers, rivals and possible new entrants, however I have included a summary of the 2010 Industry report which will serve to highlight a few points. However for many industries we do not have a clear idea for what the Industry structure is or who are the buyers or suppliers. We will have the Business Reference Librarion come and give a presentation on research tools we have to give us this information. This will be useful in the Industry Creation report assignment
Readings:
US Auto Industry Outlook
Owen’s idea in class was cool and remined me of a product I had seen before. The concept is similar, you dont want to beat the purpose of an alarm clock by hitting the snooze button (by the way there is no escaping the snooze button as you have to have something to shut off the alarm). Here is a cool idea developed as a class project at MIT by a grad student. Its already worth half a million doallars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLS20pWMs6Q
I posted an example of the business plan, the worksheet that you will use for the feasibility analysis, and the business concept worksheet on the “Assignments” tab, which shows on the front page. We will be going over them in more detail later.
Also, if you’re interested in the statistics that we shared on entrepreneurship in general, you can see the book that we based it on:
http://www.amazon.com/Illusions-Entrepreneurship-Costly-Entrepreneurs-Investors/dp/0300113315
This week we will start our first module on Industry/Strategy. The first class will focus on giving a conceptual understanding of value creation. For part of the class, we will discuss an academic article that presents a well-reasoned view of how value is created in a simple economy. We will go through some fun short exercises that illustrate when value is created, how much and who appropriates value. Please skim through the article and if you find some sections difficult or confusing, skip them.
Readings:
Brandenburger & Stuart Article
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