Strategic Computing and Communications Technology
Fall 2005
1 Instructors
2 Numerology
This an Management of Technology course and has 3 different numbers.
It is known as INFOSYS 224, MBA 290C.1 and EECS C201, depending which
department you are in.
3 Prerequisites
Graduate standing in the College of Engineering, Haas School of
Business, School of Information Management and Systems. Space
permitting, graduate students from other units, or advanced
undergraduate students, may be admitted.
4 Topics
This course is about business strategy for technology-intensive
industries. We distinguish between external strategy (how to
interact with customers, suppliers, complementors and competitors) and
internal strategy (how to organize and manage the resources of
the firm). Of course, these are very broad issues, and our primary
focus will be primarily applications involving on external strategy
in information technology industries.
Traditional business strategy has focused on the the classical issues
of suppliers, customers, competitors, entrants and substitute products.
However, several new phenomena emerge in technology intensive
industries such as
- Network effects.
- The value of a new product to a potential
user may depend on how many users adopt it.
- Lock-in.
- Once a product is adopted, it may be very costly for
users to switch to a new product.
- System effects.
- The demand for your product, such as software,
may depend on the price and characteristics of other very different
products such computer hardware.
- Co-opetition.
- The same firms may be both competitors,
suppliers, customers and providers of complementary goods and
services.
5 Reading
The basic textbook for the course is Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian,
Information Rules, Harvard Business School Press, which focuses
primarily on external strategy. Other readings and lecture materials
will be provided for internal strategy discussions.
6 Requirements
There are two types of requirements.
- Individual requirements
- Participate in class discussion
- Read business and technology press and find 4 examples of news
stories involving technology strategy over course of semester.
Submit them along with a one or two paragraph summary of how this
relates to course topics.
- Group requirements
- Technology assessment. Prepare a Powerpoint presentation on a particular technology.
We will assign technologies and topics to groups based on interest.
Groups will be created by instructors in order to ensure balance among
students with different backgrounds.
- Policy debate. Prepare debate on assigned policy issue. We
will tell you which side you are on a couple days before actual
debate.
7 Grading
Grading will be based on the items mentioned above along with group
evaluation of individual contributions.
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