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To aid students in the EC course, "Competing Through Business Models."

This simple model of marketing strategy can provide keys to creating a sustainable competitive advantage. Suitable for MBA and executive formats, this technical note demonstrates that individual marketing strategy concepts are interconnected, which renders the strategic process vulnerable to the political machinations of executives. Evolving customer needs and competitors' proactive efforts to steal market share require a dynamic marketing strategy.

This note was created to supplement classroom discussion in the EC course "Managing the Financial Firm" and provides background for exploring issues general managers in financial firms face in considering appropriate capital levels.

This note addresses the question of valuation in the venture capital setting. It discusses the methodologies most commonly in practice for arriving at valuation. Because valuation methodologies can yield widely varying results, this note looks at valuation from many different angles. The note addresses critical questions including: What value should the entrepreneur put on his/her company when first raising capital? What should the venture capitalist (VC) pay to invest in the company? What is the appropriate valuation for subsequent rounds of financing? What is the right value at which to exit the investment?

This note emphasizes the idea that managers will often want to ask experts to express their opinions about important business risks using the precise language of probability. Examples are drawn from the 2008 financial crisis and involve value-at-risk financial reporting. The second half of this note explains how a manager might use a scoring rule to evaluate the quality of experts' probability forecasts. This note is intended to accompany an instructor's own real-time forecasting exercise where students forecast, at the beginning of a week, quantities and events that will be realized by the end of the week. The quantities and events may include stock prices, commodity prices, interest rates, exchange rates, bond ratings, political votes, movie box-office revenues, Nielsen television ratings, weather events, athletic event attendance, and so on.

This note covers the basics of real estate from a portfolio manager's perspective. It examines how money is made in real estate, how real estate is valued, the differences among various types of real estate, and how to do basic financial modelling such as net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR).

What is business model innovation? A business model is much more than a description of a particular product or service. In addition to describing the offering itself, it lays out the value proposition behind it (i.e., how it creates value for a defined set of customers). It also describes the capabilities and resources needed to execute that value proposition and how the organization will generate profits from doing so. The key stages of business model innovation are exploration, pattern-finding, concept development, prototyping, piloting, and scaling. This technical note examines each of the stages in more detail, with suggested techniques along the way. It includes worksheets for students on value chain analysis, concept development, and piloting. The note is meant to be used in conjunction with "Leading Organic Growth: Module Caselets" (UV1643), which also includes an instructor's teaching note that outlines a course module.

The purpose of this technical note is to introduce a creativity exercise based on photo stimuli to business-school faculty and to discuss how it can be used effectively in the MBA and executive education classrooms. Variants of this exercise are in use at design and innovation firms. It works well for a 90-minute class session. The goal is to get participants to engage in the processes of observation and idea generation by using a set of photographs (taken from a random family album) as the subject of observation, and to gain an understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of this type of observational research.

Real estate is an increasingly important component in the portfolios of institutional investors. This note discusses the issues these investors must consider when investing in real estate from the legal forms of ownership, to separate or commingled funds, to property type and geography, to broad or focused managers, to leverage, to the timing of investment, and finally, to the compensation paid to both external managers and internal staff.

This module note examines the way in which professional content producers in the creative industries approach product and product portfolio management, and explores the underlying reasons for their strategies.

This module note examines issues concerning the management and marketing of talent in the creative industries. It describes the characteristics of the market for creative talent, discusses how individual talent creates and captures value, and explores how professional firms can best recruit, develop, manage and market creative talent.

The consequences of global climate change are far-reaching, spanning outcomes of precipitation pattern changes to the spread of vector-borne diseases into new territory. Various data suggest if climate change is not addressed in a timely manner, then business models will need to change drastically. This paper addresses various attempts governments have used to target greenhouse gas reduction, resulting in either "compliance" or "voluntary" markets. An outline of the Kyoto Protocol presents topics of market regulation, reductions measurement and carbon auditing, with implications for firms in Kyoto-compliant nations. Voluntary markets control their emissions through purchase of Verified Emissions Reductions (VERs), which is significantly different than operating in a compliance market with its own challenges and benefits. Carbon market research is still in its infancy and challenges abound in terms of public perception, trust, pricing, cost of certification, scale and functionality.

For 200 years, there were substantial differences among U.S. regions in per capita incomes and economic growth. Each region had a distinct set of economic activities and, to a major degree, the differences in regional economic performance were linked to the differences in economic structure. Individual states experienced periods of expansion and contraction as the basic business activities dominating their economy expanded and contracted. These changes led to significant migration of people and businesses among regions and to a gradual narrowing, since the 1930s, of regional disparities. Over the period of 1990 to 2007, the United States experienced outstanding economic success. Many analysts expressed the view that this economic success rested on consistently high productivity growth. The public philosophy supported low taxes and low government expenditure for health, education and welfare, with a heavy reliance on the need for each individual to succeed on one's own. In the second half of the 20th century, a general recognition developed that knowledge has a major impact on economic growth, and that increasingly intense international competition is based upon knowledge and innovation. Each nation, as well as each region within a nation, has a distinct innovation system. At the forefront has been the United States. By the fall of 2008, it was clear that the United States had entered a major financial and economic crisis, and that reforms might be needed to achieve recovery and to prevent a recurrence.

The note describes a systematic process for framing and researching the issues that should be analyzed in the course of considering a new venture idea.

Structurally speaking, we are on the cusp of a new competitive era. The old era, in which one independent company wrestled with its horizontal market rivals for a bigger slice of the pie, is giving way to a game that is more nuanced, more challenging-but also bigger. In this new game, the smartest, most successful players will be those who build more unified end-to-end systems that deliver tangible value and improved experiences to customers. This technical note focuses on how to manage and orchestrate vital, differentiated-and profitable-customer experiences on a recurrent basis across inter-organizational value chains and routes-to-market systems.

This note discusses methods for reducing costs, particularly labor costs, in a financially distressed organization.

Underserved urban and rural areas have found venture capital support via U.S. Community Development Venture Capital institutions, which numbered 68 and managed $870 million as of 2008. Suitable for MBA, undergraduate, and executive learners studying venture capital, urban development, and private equity, this stand-alone backgrounder is also an excellent companion to cases about specific venture capital organizations. CDVCs face challenges unique in the field of private equity, including where they operate and how much lower their rates of return and compensation are.

This note discusses the legal issues entrepreneurs must consider as they form their company as a legal entity. In Q&A format, the note concisely defines the types of entity available and discusses when and how to engage a lawyer.

This case series is designed to illustrate the specificities of competition in poor and developing economies and, more specifically, competition at the Base of the Pyramid. It is composed of four documents: two company cases, a country note, and an industry note. The company cases describe the competitive dynamics between two international telecom companies, Orange and MTN, in the Cameroonian telecom market. Each company case begins with a brief history of the company, followed by a description of the company's global strategy and of its entry into Cameroon. It goes on to describe the competitive dynamics in Cameroon from the company's perspective, and, particularly, the moves and counter-moves undertaken by each competitor to gain market share. Finally, the case describes the company's Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, globally and in Cameroon. The case series also includes two background notes. The first note describes the evolution and the basic technical characteristics of the cell phone industry. The second note provides an introduction to the geography, history, and economy of Cameroon, with a particular focus on the socio-economic conditions of the country's population. Taken together, this case series allows a discussion of competition at the Base of the Pyramid, including both business and ethical aspects.

Effective, persuasive analytical writing is a critical management skill. This note trains students to write to the needs and expectations of their readers with objectivity and efficiency, whether they are writing memos, e-mails, research reports, technical briefings, position papers, or recommendations for action.