Workshop Overview

What does Google, Starbucks, Boeing, GSK, Maruti and Infosys have in common, other than being among the most respected names in their respective industries? How can B-School faculty profitably convert the experience of these and similar companies to train future top managers in taking strategic decisions? The unique features of the industries in which these companies operate pose challenges in drawing parallels between their success/failure; the challenge is much more in advising emerging industries based on the experiences of the existing ones.

Dynamic business environment makes the job of a strategist extremely challenging; even more challenging is the job of the strategic management academia as they need to build and update generalisable frameworks for strategic thinking capable of handling the dynamism yet being flexible enough to effectively accommodate the needs of individual industries. One such framework is Industry Analysis based on five forces proposed by Michael E. Porter. Industry analysis has remained a venerable tool in the strategists’ tool kit for its ability to aid top management decision making in traditional brick and mortar companies as well as those that operate in the ‘cloud’.

While the uninitiated believe rivalry among competing firms to be the most critical factor capable of crippling a firm’s profitability, based on sound reasoning and practical experience strategists and strategic management academia have for long understood and emphasized the role of industry forces in deciding the firm’s profitability. Competing effectively to create value for stakeholders demands a critical understanding of the industry structure. Fortifying the understanding on industry structure, Michael Porter recently revisited his original idea of industry analysis and emphasised on the need to quantify the forces that shape the industry structure, the importance of the time horizon on which decisions are taken and the need to bring in a temporal dimension in analysing industry structure.