Technology Strategy

Catalog description

This course is about business strategy for technology-intensive industries. Examples of such industries are computer hardware and software, media and entertainment, telecommunications and e-commerce. We will explore the unique economic circumstances facing firms in these industries and identify strategies that enable firms to succeed given these circumstances. You will learn to analyze pricing strategies including versioning and bundling; product standardization decisions; managing product complements; exploiting network effects; managing platform competition. This course will help you understand the unique economic characteristics seen in today's technology-intensive markets and how they impact the strategic interactions among firms and consumers. We will study, for example: Why firms in the IT industry give away their best products for free. Why makers of video gaming consoles subsidize end users (but tax game developers) while computer operating system makers subsidize software developers (but overcharge end users). Why Sony won the Blu-Ray format war against HD-DVD which was sponsored by a whole array of companies. In order to understand how firms strategically interact with consumers in technology-intensive industries this course will use a combination of simple but rigorous analytical models, emerging theories, and formal case studies. Prerequisites: 21-120 and ( 21-256 or 21-259 ) and 73-100 and 73-230