Strategy in the Age of Digital Disruption Programme Onboarding

This week is laying foundations for the overall programme, starting with the exploration of how technology is shaping the world around us. It continues with clarifying what is meant by digital industrial revolution and explaining why digital is driving ever-greater interest. It also explores the links to the original industrial revolution.
Finally Professor Zemsky shares a personal example of coming up with a digital response to changing environment. 

In Launch Week, you will also find guidance on how to make the most of the course, information on course completion and certification requirements, and an overview of the journey you will take over the next 8 weeks. You will learn how to navigate the platform and about the different functionalities available.
You will also find out about the “Action Learning Project” (ALP). The ALP is an integral part of the online course. It offers you the opportunity to apply your learning to explore ways to apply programme concepts to come up with a digital strategy based on a winning value proposition. The objective of the ALP is to reinforce your learning and develop a tangible action plan for your project. 

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the challenges and opportunities of living in a digital world.
• Gain insight about Digital Industrial Revolution. Is it hype or reality?
• Learn some lessons from the original industrial revolution that still hold true today.

This week introduces the overall strategic framework we will use to assess potential digital opportunities and to shape strategy formulation and execution in response. We will find that it is important to not only clarify the meaning of digital disruption, but also of strategy itself. This week reviews complementary approaches to strategy: (i) assuring fit between the company and its changing environment and (ii) resource allocation to achieve well-defined objectives. We will consider how digital can shift the set of activities and players in an industry value chain.

This week we will also start forming an understanding of AI and explore to what extent deep knowledge of technology is necessary to derive value from it.
Finally, we will discuss the most important aspects of digital transformation and why some companies struggle more than others.

Learning Objectives:

• Review key approaches to business strategy and understand how they are useful in meeting the challenge of digital disruption.
• Get introduced to the overarching FIT framework that will be developed throughout the programme to analyse environment, value proposition and organisations’ readiness in digital context.
• Become familiar with the industry value chain to map the set of activities and players in your external environment and the ways they are shifting with new digital technologies.
• Understand the basics of AI from business perspective and learn what it means to be tech savvy.
• Learn about five focus areas of digital transformation.

A focus on value provides a powerful compass for navigating the changes created by digital. The second week of the programme introduces the key concepts of value creation, willingness-to-pay (WTP) and resource costs, and then illustrates how to use them to assess the impact of new products and technologies. We will leverage the value approach to deepen our analysis of the external changes impacting your business.
This week also explores the concept of social value and how the shifting attitudes towards technology can impact perceived value creation.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn how to assess new digital possibilities.
• Get introduced to the value approach to digital strategy, including the definition of value creation and its drivers.
• Gain the ability to apply the concept of willingness-to-pay in both B2C and B2B settings, with a particular focus on new and emerging products and technologies.
• Develop an understanding of social value and importance of sustainability in digital strategy.

Week 3 continues our focus on how digital can transform the industry landscape, with a shift in focus from value creation to value capture. How can you ensure that you have a robust business model that not only creates value for society, but also positions you to capture a significant share? Digital can both fuel intense competition and lead to winner-take-all dynamics.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand how value capture depends on the competitive dynamics among the players that collaborate in value creation.
• Recognize the critical role of positive feedback in allowing digital to not only increase competitive pressures, but also create highly profitable positions within the industry value chain. See how data can increase the chance of creating positive feedback scenarios.
• Apply the concept of added value to understand competitive advantage.

How to execute on a digital strategy? This week focuses on the tension between the need for greater strategic agility in a digital world and the traditional need for a longer-term orientation. With ever-greater industry ‘clock speed’, strategy analysis and formulation needs to become an ongoing process informed by the learning from strategy execution. At the same time, success still depends critically on having the longer term perspective required to develop a coherent strategy, where the value proposition, organisational activities and underlying resources are aligned. 

This week will also explore what it takes to create a data culture in an organisation to deliver on digital strategies. We will also discuss some myths and truths around executing on AI strategies.

Learning Objectives:

• See how agility is critically important in a digital world and that more than ever strategy needs to be an ongoing process integrating execution with formulation and analysis.
• Develop your ability to identify the key resources built over time that are required for strategy execution and to anticipate how digital may be shifting the nature of key resources.
• Learn how to foster a data culture in your organisation.
• Gain insight on what to consider when executing on AI strategies.

In this final week of the course we will take a holistic view on crafting and executing digital strategy. With the help of a new strategic tool – the company value chain – you will discover how key organizational activities are critical to delivering new digital value propositions, as well as how those activities themselves can be transformed by digital. We will also explore strategic partnerships which offer an important route in a digital world for achieving agility given current resource constraints, while also allowing you to build new resources needed for the future..

Learning Objectives:

• Develop a big picture understanding of how different elements come together in execution on digital strategy.
• Understand the role of partnerships to enhance strategic agility by filling resource gaps, while also providing opportunities to develop new resources.
• Use the company value chain to ensure activities within the organisation across key functions and competencies are aligned with the value proposition.
• Learn about potential AI traps and pitfalls. 

The final weeks are for you to synthesise your learning from the programme into a compelling Final ALP Assignment submission. You will also have the opportunity to exchange feedback on the Final ALP Assignment with your peers. No new course content will be released in these weeks.