Business Strategy from Wharton: Competitive Advantage

Maintaining a competitive advantage takes more than great timing or a single solution. Sustainable advantage requires a well-designed and well-executed strategy. This course was created to give you the tools and frameworks you need to develop and execute a successful strategy. You’ll learn how to evaluate your own strategy, as well as how to locate sources of potential competitive advantage from a perspective that encompasses the internal, external, and dynamic fit of your strategy. You’ll also learn how to enhance your ability to assess the strategic impact of the moves of your competitors and how to maintain competitive advantage, understand the general drivers that create and sustain competitive advantage, and how to identify organizational barriers to change. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to assess and redesign your current strategy and develop plans for effective implementation to give your firm a competitive advantage.

• Evaluate your strategic environment in the present and the future
• Identify the differences between organizational effectiveness and strategic positioning
• Map core and supporting activities of your firm and how they interact with each other
• Locate organizational barriers to strategy implementation and organizational change
• Engage in a strategic planning process that works

• Familiarity with basic business concepts
• This is a graduate level course