Creating Customer Value and Business Growth

Introduction

Addressing top management teams, this program focuses on growth of technology firms. Such firms face considerable risks of failure due to a variety of knowledge gaps and lack of overview and control over actual and potential risk factors. These may concern technology risks, market and customer risks, partnership risks, regulatory risks, financial risks, management team risks, operational risks etc. This course starts out by offering tools and frameworks designed to conduct external analyses of a firm’s industry, markets and stakeholders, including clients. Internal tools offer an understanding of key resources and capabilities, in addition to the activities that firms need to create value for themselves and their customers. Based on these tools/frameworks, the student will conduct comprehensive strategy analyses.

It then moves on to focus on the need of the company to create sufficient value to its customers and the need to develop in depth knowledge of actual customer needs to ensure convincing product-market fit. Based on this, the students will conduct market and customer research to validate their market and customer strategies.

The following topic will be on management control strategies and methods commonly used to reduce risks and manage the scaling up processes. Finally, the program will teach and evaluate scaling-up market strategies covering both domestic and international alternatives.

Course content

“Customer Value Creation” consists of 6 lecturing modules and minimum 30 student work hours with out of class student research work.
1) Strategy
2) Strategic analysis
3) Creating customer value
4) Market and customer validation
5) Risk reduction and management control
6) Scaling-up strategies

Student research work will focus on research problems, key assumptions and hypothesis identification, on data gathering from interviews as well as from secondary sources, and on analysis, presentation and discussion of findings in class and clarification of implications for business model adjustments. The work will be instructed by the program responsible faculty team and supported by Tsinghua-BI team of associated coaches, mentors and investors assisting the candidates during out of class work.