Exam 2: Strategy and Technology: Concepts and Frameworks for Understanding What Separates Winners From Losers

Firms that build an imitation-resistant value chain develop a way of doing business that others struggle to replicate.

Businesses benefit from economies of scale when the cost of an investment can be:

A firm can benefit from high switching costs, even when rivals offer free products.

One of the key questions posed by 21st century managers is "How can we possibly compete when everyone can copy our technology and the competition is a click away?" One path to take involves creating a resource or set of resources for sustainable competitive advantage. List the four characteristics that such resources must have for the possibility of sustainable competitive advantage to exist. Why is it important to have all four simultaneously?

_____ are products or services that are nearly identically offered from multiple vendors.

_____ hold intellectual property not with the goal of bringing novel innovations to market but instead in hopes that they can sue or extort large settlements from others.

Startup firms can struggle to gain lower prices from rivals, but FreshDirect seems to have found several ways to gain lower supplier prices. FreshDirect buys direct from suppliers, eliminating any markup from a middleman. In addition to this, the firm employs other methods to get lower prices from suppliers. Which of the following is not a way FreshDirect helps suppliers in exchange for supplier agreement to offer it better pricing terms?

Dell, previously the world's number one PC manufacturer, has seen its market share shrink because of rivals copying its value chain and reducing the price advantage it enjoyed over rivals. Dell's present struggles:

A strong brand can be an exceptionally powerful resource for competitive advantage by lowering ________, proxying _____ and inspiring _____.

12. Sometimes technology can sound geeky and so technical that executives might think that it doesn't require managerial or investor attention. However many investing in the telecom sector suffered from a lack of insight on how a key technology was impacting their industry. Telecom firms failed to anticipate the impact of a technology known as ____________, which enabled existing fiber to carry more transmissions than ever before.

_____, also known as the Industry and Competitive Analysis, is a popular framework for examining a firm's competitive environment.

According to the resource-based view of competitive advantage, if a firm is to maintain sustainable competitive advantage, it must control a set of exploitable resources that are valuable and can be substituted easily.

In _____, the light inside fiber is split into different signal-carrying wavelengths in a way similar to how a prism splits light into different colors.

More recently, Apple has leveraged its _____ platform as a distribution channel to launch a new subscription service. Just nine months after launching the Apple Music, the firm had attracted over 13 million paying subscribers to its streaming service..

A trademark is the symbolic embodiment of all the information connected with a product or service of a firm.

The resource-based view of competitive advantage states that for a firm to maintain sustainable competitive advantage it must control a set of exploitable resources that have four critical characteristics. What are these characteristics?

Moving first pays off when the time lead is used to create:

The scale of technology investment required to run a business can act as a barrier to entry by discouraging new, smaller competitors.

How did Apple trump Google to become the dominant mapping platform on iOS?

How does FreshDirect leverage an imitation-resistant value chain to repel rivals?