Project – Analysis of Your Firm

Order Description
Questions to Guide Analysis of Your Firm

1. Create or describe a strategy for your firm, as operationalized by Collis and Rukstad. Be sure to be comprehensive and specific when separately describing your objective/scope/advantage and the subcomponents of each one. As a final portion of your answer, append and describe the activity-system map of your firm. [Figure 1]

2. How would you evaluate the sustainability of your advantages and your competitors’ advantages in terms of the criteria of the resource-based view? Be specific by describing all of the criteria and sub-criteria for each advantage.

3. Describe a Customer R&D Strategy for managing customer-centric innovation within your firm that contains a description of phase 1 and recommendations for each of the other phases. In so doing, identify potential errors in judgment that could result in failure of the recommendations.

4. Does your firm pass “the coherence test?” Specifically answer the questions posed in the test.

5. From the various bases for segmentation we noted in class, describe your firm’s segmentation scheme. Then, using the illustration provided by Harrington and Tjan as an example, create a preference profile of the different segments you serve or a preference profile of purchasers versus end-users. [Figure 2]

6. Characterize your firm in terms of the four metrics described by Rust, Moorman, and Bhalla. Are the metrics used by your firm appropriate for its context? Why or why not?

7. Your firm presumably engages in some form of one-to-one marketing. Describe all of the tactical advantages associated with one-to-one marketing that it does—and could—exploit.

8. On what bases are your firm’s products positioned vis-à-vis the competition? Graphically depict the positioning of firms in your industry using a 2-dimensional perceptual map. [Figure 3]

9. Describe and draw a strategy canvas that includes your firm and its competitors. Refer to your canvas to characterize the competitive nature of your business in terms of focus and divergence. Finally, provide a compelling tagline for your firm. [Figure 4]

10. What forces have resulted in the proliferation of your product/service line? How would you gauge the complexity of your firm using the criteria of Gottfredson and Aspinall?

11. In terms of the scheme described by Shankar, Berry,and Dotzel, which type of hybrid offering does (or would) fit your firm the best. How so?

12. Aside from product innovation, how else can your firm engage in business innovation to create value and differentiate itself from competitors? Please be specific.
You are limited to 6 pages of text (single-spaced, 1” margins, 12-point Times-Roman font), not including the four figures. Please begin your paper with a very brief description of your firm/unit. To reduce ambiguity, reproduce each question above your answer. (You may reproduce the questions in smaller font if length becomes a problem.) Your answers should make specific reference to the class material by adopting its terminology. In general, strive to indicate that you have thought deeply and comprehensively about the class material and that you are not providing generic or superficial responses