2-2 Harvard Business Review Simulation and Journal 400

Instructions

Several of the largest corporations in the world first started as small family-owned businesses. The strategic decisions they made as a family over the years determined their growth path.

In this course, you will complete three runs of a 30-minute business simulation. In the simulation, you will make decisions to grow an innovative and sustainable family business through several generations while balancing the relationships between the business, your family, and ownership. 

For this assignment, complete your first run of the simulation. This time, as you work through the simulation and make decisions regarding diversification for the company, consider the blue ocean strategy in your approach. Then, complete and submit your journal assignment.

Overview

The situations you faced and the decisions you made in the simulation may have affected the company’s success in obtaining a competitive advantage over the market. As you have learned in this module, opportunity-based thinking is critical to blue ocean strategy (BOS). For a business to achieve success through BOS, its leader must have the right mindset and ask deeper questions to hopefully remove bias and false boundaries from their judgment.

Prompt

In this journal, you will reflect on whether and how your decisions in the simulation aligned with blue ocean strategy principles, innovation, and competitive advantage.

Discuss your opportunity-focused mindset during the simulation by answering the questions below:

Value creation and competitive advantage: How do you think the company did regarding value creation and gaining a competitive advantage across generations?

Thought process: Did you “think differently” while you made your decisions in the simulation? Explain why or why not.

Discovery: What have you discovered or learned after completing the first round of the simulation?