Contributed by Russ Coff
A number of excellent suggestions came out of the SMS Teaching Community session on using videos in class. Eventually, all of these will be integrated into this site. Here are a few additional video libraries you may wish to check out.
seems to be closed down now. They also offered a prize for submissions of the best exercises and tools for teaching entrepreneurship. This looked like a really nice resource. It would be great if people can re-post some of the best exercises here as well. Please feel free to submit if you have run any of them in your class (but be careful to attribute credit to the original authors and provide links to the original post).
Here are a series of news articles that one can distribute (not all are really needed). In order to assess Google’s prospects for creating value, one must evaluate the following key sources of uncertainty:
The essence of this exercise is simple. Teams must build a device that will catch an egg dropped from 25 feet (e.g., a stairwell). The trick is that they must build it from items purchased in an auction. As such, items that are easy to use (e.g., an old pillow) are very expensive while items that are hard to imagine a use for (a brick) are cheap. Profit is determined by 1) succeeding in the task of catching an egg and 2) having the lowest cost function. As such, this demonstrates Barney’s (1986) notion of superior expectations in strategic factor markets.
Now that you see where this is going, here are the rest of the details.
This video shows a play one could never plan. Might it be possible to train a team to improvise when the opportunity presented?
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
The Tinkertoy exercise is simple but exposes students to a variety of issues linked to formulating and implementing strategy. This deeper application of the common ice breaker has been published by Coff & Hatfield (2003) in JSME (Click here for full text). There are a number of slight modifications that make the exercise very valuable for different topics in a strategy course. For example:
The exercise can demonstrate key features of the resource based perspective and first mover advantage by having the teams execute in waves and watch how much imitation occurs (often team stick to their planned strategy even if they watch another team fail using that plan).
Jay Barney describes how he teaches Strategic Management for Executive Education, giving examples of Walmart, Southwest Airlines and their success in very tough industries.
“I teach the topic of Strategic Vision at the beginning of the semester in Strategic Management for undergraduates, and was drawing on Collins & Porras’ HBR article dealing with this topic (Sept/Oct 1996). They discuss envisioning the future as one aspect of developing a strategic vision for a company. Envisioning the future includes having a long term goal they call a “BHAG” (big, hairy, audacious goal) and writing a vivid narrative description of how things will look when the BHAG is achieved. My senior undergraduate 
in-class exercise was for them to write their own BHAG for their career 5 years from now, along with a vivid description of what a day in their professional life would be like (as they might describe it to a former classmate in five years). For some of them, this is the first time they thought in concrete terms this far into their professional futures. I got very positive feedback from the class on this exercise and some of them did a remarkably good job with it. I read two of them aloud to the class (anonymously). I sometimes find it difficult to craft meaningful exercises early in the semester before we have gotten into the “meat” of the concepts of Strategic Management, and was glad to get a good response from my students on this one.”
A collection of clever and funny video vignettes compiled by VW to show innovative ways of getting people involved in bettering the environment. FunTheory
A synopsis of the business management book ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’.
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
Great to have these Cirque videos if you teach Blue Ocean Strategy concepts. CAUTION – this material is addictive!
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
Great to have these Cirque videos if you teach Blue Ocean Strategy concepts. CAUTION – this material is addictive!
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
Great to have these Cirque videos if you teach Blue Ocean Strategy concepts. CAUTION – this material is addictive!
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
Commentary by Dr. Erwin Danneels from WPI on June 19, 2008. The focus of this commentary is on the effects of open communication on innovation at firms.
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
Flat World Knowledge is a great example of a blossoming Blue Ocean Strategy. The Atlas Black exerpt is based on one of their new graphic novels
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
Download the Bacon Salt Article here
I use the BaconSalt case to talk about how to shift from a product-strategy-mindset to an organization-thinking mindset. The Midwest Express article(linked here – and that I use as the “case”) does a good job summarizing the firm and here is also the link to the BaconSalt YouTube video website. A fun and tasty case.
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
If you teach the Cadbury acquisition case (of Adams) this funny ad from the Canadian region can be a nice complement since they were trying to create revenue synergies across the two companies (including introducing new products). Note that the synergies are spelled out in surprising detail in the B case where Cadbury management identifies 70 distinct synergies along with the type of synergy (cost or revenue), their likelihood of being achieved, an estimate of the potential value, and what region would be involved.
Contributed by Mason Carpenter
Carpenter Strategy Toolbox 