Course Syllabus for students Autumn 2024

On completion of the course the students will be able to:

1. Describe and explain how digital technology emerges, evolves, and enters markets, including its barriers to adoption.
2. Describe under what conditions digitalization leads to competitive turbulence and disruption (e.g. entrants displacing incumbent firms).
3. Explain the interplay between digitalization, legislation, industry structure, and industry competition.
4. Account for relevant techniques and models that can be used for analysing industrial forces, transformations, and strategic opportunities in the external environment of the firm.

5. Apply relevant frameworks that inform the investigation of industrial dynamics, digitalization, and the identification of strategic opportunities.
6. Collect, visualize and present data and examples of industrial dynamics and digitalization

7. Formulate conclusions and managerial recommendations for firms affected by digitalization

The course focuses on external analysis, helping students to understand and investigate environmental forces (with a focus on digitalization) and the strategic opportunities that they create.
The course provides an overview of the theoretical and practical approaches to digitalization and industrial dynamics, expanding on the role of competition, institutional change, industry structure, regulation as well as the emergence and diffusion of digital technology. Towards the end of the course, all these complementary perspectives are woven together by only looking at various cases and empirical illustrations.

Connection to Research and Practice
The objective of the course is to give students tools to practically conduct external analysis to inform strategic decision-making. The course is grounded in the forefront of academic research on digitalization and industrial dynamics with many research papers as course literature. Reflection on the advancements of research and on how different theories both complement and substitute each other are integral parts of examination. The relevance of these theories is made visible through project work where students act as analysts, via a take home exam, presentations and guest lectures. During examination students are asked to apply what they have learnt and try to draw conclusions and come up with recommendations in various real-world situations.

Lectures, seminars, presentations, supervision meetings.

The teaching is conducted in English.

Bachelor’s degree (i.e the equivalent of 180 ECTS credits at an accredited university) with at least 30 credits in Business Administration and 30 credits in one (or a combination) of the following areas: Business Administration, Economics, Industrial Engineering and Management, Business Analytics, Informatics, Information Technology, Communication, Commerce (or the equivalent). Proof of English proficiency is required.

The course is graded A, B, C, D, E, FX or F.

Individual written exam (ILOs: 1-7) representing 4 credits.
Group assignment (ILOs: 1-7), representing 3,5 credits.

Name of the Test	Value	Grading
Written individual examination1	4 credits	A/B/C/D/E/FX/F
Group assignment1	3.5 credits	A/B/C/D/E/FX/F

¹ All parts of the compulsory examination in the course must be passed with a passing grade (A-E) before a final grade can be set. Grade is set in accordance to JIBS grading policy.

It is the responsibility of the examiner to ensure that each course is evaluated. At the outset of the course, the programme evaluators in the course must be contacted. In the middle of the course, the examiner should meet the programme evaluators to identify strengths/weaknesses in the first half of the course.

At the end of the course, the examiner should remind students to fill in the survey. The examiner should also call a meeting with the programme evaluators to debrief the course, based on course evaluation data and comments. The next time the course runs, students should be informed of any measures taken to improve the course based on the previous course evaluations.

At the end of each study period, JIBS’ Director of Quality and Accreditation crafts a “Course Evaluation Quarter Report”, presenting the quantitative results from course evaluation surveys. The Associate Dean of Education, The Associate Deans of Faculty, Programme Directors, and JSA President and Quality receive the report.

Academic integrity
JIBS students are expected to maintain a strong academic integrity. This implies to behave within the boundaries of academic rules and expectations relating to all types of teaching and examination.

Copying someone else’s work is a particularly serious offence and can lead to disciplinary action. When you copy someone else’s work, you are plagiarising. You must not copy sections of work (such as paragraphs, diagrams, tables and words) from any other person, including another student or any other author. Cutting and pasting is a clear example of plagiarism. There is a workshop and online resources to assist you in not plagiarising called the Interactive Anti-Plagiarism Guide.

Other forms of breaking academic integrity include (but are not limited to) adding your name to a project you did not work on (or allowing someone to add their name), cheating on an examination, helping other students to cheat and submitting other students work as your own, and using non-allowed electronic equipment during an examination. All of these make you liable to disciplinary action.

A list of articles will be supplied at the course introduction.