GRA 8255 Value Creation in Business Markets (2020/2021)
GRA 8255 Value Creation in Business Markets (2020/2021)
Companies exist because they provide value to a number of stakeholders, their customers included. Creating value is therefore fundamental for a company’s ability to becoming successful. Value creation has implications both for the overall strategic performance of companies, in particular for its marketing performance. This course will draw on fundamental concepts from strategy and business-to-business marketing theory, where value creation is concerned with a company’s ability to develop and sustain business relationships with suppliers, customer and managing a network of connected parties. The course will help to develop an ability to structure and analyze problems within this context, and provide appropriate tools and concepts for solving them.
The students shall be able to understand:
- The strategic fit between a company’s internal resources, capabilities and activities, and its external context including the marketing environment
- The functioning of external and internal analytical tools/frameworks
- The links between these tools and their role in the overall strategy process
- The significance of relationship marketing in B2B marketing thought and practice
- How business networks affect relationships between organisations
The students shall learn to:
- Use insights from strategy analysis (e.g. through the SWOT framework) in generating, evaluating and choosing strategic alternatives
- Promote value co-creation between manufacturing firms and different kinds of service organizations
- Critically review organizations’ strategic marketing performance
- Consider the role and importance of relationships (internal and external) in the value creating process
- Balance value creation and value appropriation
The students shall be able to:
- Reflect on the role of strategy for firm performance
- Reflect on different perspectives on competitive and shared advantages
- Understand the dynamic and recursive nature of strategy analysis and process
- Reflect on social and ethical issues concerned with business strategy decisions and market performance
- Reflect on different dimensions of value creation and business model design
The course is structured around four main areas relevant to strategy and business market management: (1) The analytical foundations of value creation (2) Value co-creation (3) Value creation and b relationship development (4) Value appropriation and business model design.
The analytical foundations of value creation
Some organizations are more successful than others; they create and appropriate value by competing and cooperating with a number of stakeholders in their environment. To understand how successful organizations deliver and capture value we need to apprehend both the organization and its environment. Internal strategy analyses illustrate how resources and activities contribute to organizational performance. The purpose of external analysis is to analyze how external factors influence organizational strategies. The information obtained from external and internal analyses are synthesized in a SWOT framework, which, if correctly developed and employed, is a fruitful tool when generating strategic alternatives and making decisions.
Value co-creation
Here the main focus is on value co-creation and what this implies for companies. We will discuss the importance of marketing within firms and the role of business marketing for value creation. We then move over to specifics of B2B marketing such as customer-supplier interaction and relationship management. Particularly we will focus on the buying process of B2B customers and supplier relationship development.
Main themes covered in this section:
- B2B Marketing principles
- Business relationship fundamentals
Industrial buying behaviour
Value creation and customer relationship development
Here we will focus in depth on value and what value creation implies for business relationship management. Particularly we will discuss customer relationship development. We will study how value can be created across multiple business relationships such as business networks and marketing channels. The students will also learn how to understand industrial buying behaviour. Finally, we will discuss what this implies for strategic business market management.
Main themes covered in this section:
- Managing business relationships with customers and suppliers
- Business networking
Value appropriation and business model design
Organizations handle inter-firm interdependencies in order to both create and appropriate value. We therefore need to address both value creation and value appropriation. Value appropriation concerns the private share of the created benefits; how relational rents are appropriated by individual organizations.
Important stakeholders may be essential in co-creating value with a focal organization, but they may also be able to restrict this organization’s appropriation capacity, and consequently undermine its performance. Competitive pressures, bargaining power and cooperative mindsets all influence the appropriation capacity of a focal organization. Insights into business model design help to balance the tradeoff between value creation and value appropriation.
Attendance to all sessions in the course is compulsory. If you have to miss part(s) of the course you must ask in advance for leave of absence. More than 25% absence in a course will require retaking the entire course. It is the student's own responsibility to obtain any information provided in class that is not included on the course homepage/ It's learning or other course materials.
Candidates may be called in for an oral hearing as a verification/control of written assignments.
All the exams of the course must be passed in order to obtain a grade for the course.
The course is a part of a full Executive MBA program and examination in all courses must be
Granted admission to the EMBA programme. Please consult our student regulations.
| Assessments |
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Exam category: Submission Form of assessment: Written submission Weight: 40 Grouping: Individual Duration: 4 Week(s) Comment: Individual hand-in (case analysis), counts 40% of the final grade. Exam code: GRA 82551 Grading scale: Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade Resit: All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course |
Exam category: Activity Form of assessment: Presentation Weight: 40 Grouping: Group (2 - 8) Comment: Group oral presentation, counts 40% of the final grade. Exam code: GRA 82551 Grading scale: Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade Resit: All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course |
Exam category: Activity Form of assessment: Class participation Weight: 20 Grouping: Individual Comment: Oral class contribution, counts 20% of the final grade. Exam code: GRA 82551 Grading scale: Point scale leading to ECTS letter grade Resit: All components must, as a main rule, be retaken during next scheduled course |
| Activity | Duration | Comment |
|---|---|---|
Teaching | 48 Hour(s) | |
Prepare for teaching | 40 Hour(s) | |
Student's own work with learning resources | 72 Hour(s) | Self study, feedback activities/counselling and exam |
A course of 1 ECTS credit corresponds to a workload of 26-30 hours. Therefore a course of 6 ECTS credits corresponds to a workload of at least 160 hours.