Jean-Michel Viola's Masterclass on "Hunger Games of Strategy" , 14th of June at Maastricht School of Management Romania www.msmro.org

1. The Hunger Games of Strategy
Deadly competition in an era of openness,
sustainability and play
Jean-Michel Viola, PhD

2. What is Strategy?

3. Deadly competition
• Hypercompetition (cost + differentiation)
• Blue ocean is hard to find
• Competitive advantages can rarely be sustained
• H index are decreasing
• The case of Mobile in France (64M active sim cards in
2012)

4. Disruptive ?

5. Is Strategizing still relevant?

6. Three Schools
A B
Products
Key C
s uc c e
ss
fa c to r
s
A c t iv it ie s
C ore
C o mp e te
nc e

7. How is strategy changing?
• Business models
• Big data analytics
• Sustainability
• Gamification
• Managerial implications

8. The classical strategic model
Margin
The case of Amazon

9. What is a business model?
• Describes how an organization creates,
delivers and captures value
(Chesborough & Rosenbloom, 2002)
Technical Economic
inputs outputs

11. Business Models
•The case of Amazon
– R-D and The Kindle
– Building warehouse in NJ and will start collect sales tax
•The case of Technicolor
– Commoditization of its historic core business (electronic
appliances)
– Refocus on image technologies
– Difficulties to adjust the organization to a shrinking sales base

12. Three trends that are changing
the rules of the game

13. The age of big data
• Storage and data have grown exponentially
• Kryder’s law
• Open data trend in both the public and
private sphere
• How to make sense of this for insights and
profits?

14. The new data ecosystem
Data Mining
& Analysis

15. The age of algorithms
• Algorithm to choose a bra over 50 points @
True&Co https://trueandco.com/
• API application and dynamic display
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/
• Geolocalization to mine for technological
growth, partners and competitors

16. Big data Analytics in practice
Technicolor patents base
The age of algorithms
• True&Co has built an algorithm aver 50
points of data for women to choose a bra
• http
://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/
html
• The case of the USPTO

17. Mapping asthma for insights
Spot alternative Identify key
Technological technological
options leaders
Identify emerging
technological
options

18. A recent snapshot on asthma

19. Functional areas where companies do, and
should, focus on using big data and
analytics to improve overall performance
% of respondants, n=1469, McKinsey Report , 2012
Ideally
Currently

20. Implications for strategy
• Competition, Customers, Competitive
advantage
• A switch from getting information to
making sense of information
• New organization and new skills
• From monopolistic rent to knowledge rents

21. Gamification
• The use of game design, game thinking and game
mechanics to enhance non-game contexts
• To encourage people to adopt applications and
processes, influence how they are used
• To help solving problems
• Taking advantage of human psychological
predispositions to engage in gaming
• Augmented reality trend
• Smart cities trend

22. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGYJyur4FUA
YOUTUBE VIDEO CAN YOU
GUESS WHAT IT IS ALL
ABOUT?

23. Gamification in practice
• These are online gamers that are unlocking
the structure of an enzyme active in aids
transmission (Foldit)
• http://lemonopoly.org/

24. Implications for strategy
• Available data from gamified websites,
applications, and processes indicate potential
improvements in areas like user engagement,
ROI, data quality, timeliness, or learning

25. http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/af99b29f29da41ee

26. Sustainability (CSR)
• A stakeholders approach
• Very different flavors
• Growing commitment (business case, competitivity
issue, on the permanent agenda)

27. Sustainability in practice
• Reindustrialization in Europe and in the US
• Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid
– Mobile ICT in India
– Mobile phone markets: smart and dumb
• Diversity

28. Implications for strategy
• Ability to map, assess and address key
stakeholders… way beyond clients
• Delicately assess the CSR business model… if
there is any!
• Or assess the “good citizen tax” of doing not
too bad

29. So…
• Big data creates new opportunities for
customization but asks for new skills
• Gamification improves attention and
involvement from customers and allows for
a better knowledge of useage
• CSR is about image and norms, creates a lot
of noise in terms of ambivalent signals

30. • Strategy is about designing and assessing the
relation between an organization and its
environment
• Saying that the environment has a growing
complexity is still too soft
• Strategy is still about designing and
assessing the relation but there are much
more data to filter and much more bricks to
put together for a shorter life span

31. Managerial implications
• Critical thinking in the age of questioning
• The need for situational adaptability
• Life long learning , short live knowledge

32. Multumesc