Understand the strategic management process.
Understand the importance of the external environment and the internal resources, capabilities and competences of the firm in making strategic decisions.
Understand the use of strategic tools and frameworks when formulating business-level and corporate-level strategies.
After the course students are able to give a professional presentation.

Firms create substantial value for a wide variety of stakeholders, including customers, shareholders and employees. In order to grow the firm, and sustain its long-term competitiveness, managers need to think carefully about a number of high-level strategic decisions. Essentially, these strategic decisions involve the questions where to compete – i.e., corporate strategy – and how to compete – i.e., business strategy. The formulation of an adequate corporate and business strategy (strategy formulation) will, however, need to be guided by the vision and mission of the company as well as a careful analysis of the companies’ internal and external context (strategy analysis). The objective of this course is to familiarize students with some important concepts, frameworks and techniques that will help them successfully navigate through both phases of strategy analysis and strategy formulation. This should allow students to make better strategic decisions in their future professional lives, thereby safeguarding the value-creating potential of the firms they are active in. To achieve this objective, this course will rely on lectures, self-study, class presentations, case discussions, and team assignments. In combination, these different modes of study will offer students a deep understanding of the strategic management process and enhance their ability to apply these insights to real-life companies.

As part of the skills training program in the first year, each student has to prepare a presentation on one of the
topics dealt with in this course.

Introductory textbook on Strategy; Academic journal articles; Cases.

An advanced level of English.
No specific knowledge required.