Business Simulation Game
Competition and Strategy
Business Game
15th April 2014
The aim of the Competition and Strategy course is to provide students with deep knowledge on strategic decision-making in a business environment and the strategic principles behind it. Within this course my team members Kristijan, Yaniv, George and me (Team KUGY) had the opportunity to apply our academic and theoretical understanding and knowledge in an online business simulation game, wherein we created our own car business and competed on the European car market fictionally. This paper aims to elucidate the advance of our strategic decision-making, observes the reasoning behind it and examines the following implementation of our approach.
Founded on the definition of strategy being “A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim”, we questioned ourselves in the commencement of the game what our strategy would be (Andrews, 2010). Subsequently, after considering the theories studied in class we decided that we needed to express our own and coherent strategy in less than 40 words, fitting to the restrictions objective, advantage and scope (Tregoe, Zimmerman, Schuster, 2008).
“Attaining maximised profitability by carefully trying to get to know our customers’ needs, consequently adapting our products to suit their expectations to an extent where we would stop serving and start appreciating, so as to charge a premium price” (Yaniv, George, Kristijan and Ugo).
The theoretical model we chose to establish our strategy was Porter’s generic strategy, that led us to a differentiation-focused strategy. Given to Porter, a competitive strategy is about differentiation (Andrews, 2010). Thus we thought that we should differentiate our business best by concentrating on a narrow target, hence, few market segments and decided that differentiation would be our competitive advantage.
Furthermore Porter claims that decent strategic decision-making necessitates compromises and is slightly about what
Business Game
15th April 2014
The aim of the Competition and Strategy course is to provide students with deep knowledge on strategic decision-making in a business environment and the strategic principles behind it. Within this course my team members Kristijan, Yaniv, George and me (Team KUGY) had the opportunity to apply our academic and theoretical understanding and knowledge in an online business simulation game, wherein we created our own car business and competed on the European car market fictionally. This paper aims to elucidate the advance of our strategic decision-making, observes the reasoning behind it and examines the following implementation of our approach.
Founded on the definition of strategy being “A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim”, we questioned ourselves in the commencement of the game what our strategy would be (Andrews, 2010). Subsequently, after considering the theories studied in class we decided that we needed to express our own and coherent strategy in less than 40 words, fitting to the restrictions objective, advantage and scope (Tregoe, Zimmerman, Schuster, 2008).
“Attaining maximised profitability by carefully trying to get to know our customers’ needs, consequently adapting our products to suit their expectations to an extent where we would stop serving and start appreciating, so as to charge a premium price” (Yaniv, George, Kristijan and Ugo).
The theoretical model we chose to establish our strategy was Porter’s generic strategy, that led us to a differentiation-focused strategy. Given to Porter, a competitive strategy is about differentiation (Andrews, 2010). Thus we thought that we should differentiate our business best by concentrating on a narrow target, hence, few market segments and decided that differentiation would be our competitive advantage.
Furthermore Porter claims that decent strategic decision-making necessitates compromises and is slightly about what
Bibliography: Tregoe, B., Zimmerman, J., Schuster, S., 2008. Top Management Strategy? Harvard Business Review April 2008. Available at: http://www.nickols.us/strategy_definitions.pdf/ [Accessed 13 April 2014] Andrews, K., 2010. The Concept of Corporate Strategy, 3rd Edition. Financial Times Prentice Hall. [Accessed 13 April 2014] Porter, E., 1997. What is Strategy? Harvard Business Review Nov-Dec2008. Available at: http://www.nickols.us/strategy_definitions.pdf [Accessed 13 April 2014]