General provisions

The course is offered to exchange students.

Entry requirements

Completed 15 credits from basic courses (A-level) in business studies, and registered for another 15 credits at the same level.

Learning outcomes

The broad goal of Business Strategy is to cut across the whole spectrum of business and management. The purpose of the course is to help support the creation of a holistic understanding of the firm - about the industry and the competitive environment in which it operates. Furthermore, the purpose is also to enable an understanding of the long-term direction and strategy of a firm, its resources and competitive capabilities as well as its prospects for success. The learning objectives of the Business Strategy course are:

• To develop your capacity to think strategically about a firm as a whole; about its present business position, its long-term direction, its resources and competitive capabilities, the nature of its strategy and its opportunities for gaining sustainable competitive advantage.
• To develop your skills in conducting strategic analysis and, especially, to provide you with a strong understanding of the competitive challenges of a market.
• To give you hands-on experience in crafting business strategy, in reasoning about strategic options and using what-if scenarios to evaluate action alternatives and making sound strategic decisions.
• To get you acquainted with managerial tasks associated with implementing and executing firm strategies, to drill you in the range of actions managers can take to promote competent strategy execution such as for instance writing and presenting strategic plans as well as evaluating and developing the plans of others.
• To heighten your awareness of how and why ethical principles, core values and socially responsible management practices matter greatly in the conduct of business operations.
• To develop your reasoning in managerial judgments and help you learn how to assess business risks as well as to improve your ability to make sound business decisions and achieve effective outcomes.

Content

Unlike other business courses that concentrate more narrowly on a particular function of the business - e.g. accounting, finance, marketing, etc., strategic management is a big picture course. It cuts across the whole spectrum of business and management operations. The course covers the following topics:

1. The role and tasks of the strategy manager
2. What is strategy and what does it mean?
3. How to formulate and implement a strategic plan
4. How to use the tools and techniques of situation analysis
5. How to exercise good business judgment and make sound decisions.

Instruction

• Lectures
• Guidance sessions: group and individual sessions with the instructor for self-assessment and guidance in enhancing your overall performance and knowledge-development process.
• Seminars (LabDays): practicing the task of managerial analysis and decision-making by the use of comparative case studies focused on particular strategy elements.
• Oral presentations: practicing the task of presenting and defending a strategy design and implementation proposal.

The course is taught in English.

Assessment

The student will get one single grade, equivalent to 7.5 credits.

Based on the learning objectives the performance is evaluated by:

• Written assignments
• Active participation in seminar discussions
• Performance in oral team presentation and defence
• Satisfactory completion of theory tests
• Individual and group reports

The course consists of mandatory parts. The grade for the entire course is based on an assessment of all parts of the examination.

Grading criteria are presented in the study guide that applies to the course section. The following grades will be used, pass with distinction (VG), pass (G) and fail (U). Examinations handed in late will not be assessed except under special circumstances. Any remaining supplemental work must be handed in by the deadline specified in the study guide.

For students who have not received a passing grade for the course, the entire course (including all examinations) will have to be redone during subsequent course sections.

If there are special reasons for doing so, an examiner may make an exception from the method of assessment indicated and allow a student to be assessed by another method. An example of special reasons might be a certificate regarding special pedagogical support from the University's disability coordinator.

Uppsala University does not accept cheating and plagiarism. Suspected incidents of cheating or plagiarism are reported to the Vice-Chancellor, which may issue a formal warning to the student or expel the student from the university for a limited period of time.

NOTE: Only completed courses can count toward a degree.