This course is dual-listed with the Evening-weekend MBA Program.

COURSE NUMBER: MBA 290T.3

COURSE TITLE: Strategy for the Information Technology Firm

UNITS OF CREDIT: 2 Units

INSTRUCTOR: Jon Metzler

E-MAIL ADDRESS: jon.metzler@berkeley.edu

PREREQUISITE(S): Familiarity with microeconomics concepts (e.g. lock-in, network effects); cost accounting; and marketing concepts (customer acquisition funnels, retention, virality, churn and and customer LTV) will also be helpful.  Students in this course will read investor relations material, MBA cases and industry readings. No previous tech industry experience is required.

CLASS FORMAT: Interactive discussion on a blend of cases, readings, and instructor material, supplemented by guest speakers from industry.

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Tuesdays, 6:00PM-9:30PM
NOTE: Course will meet 10 times during the 15-week semester for 2 credits, check Spring electives spreadsheet for meeting dates. 

REQUIRED READINGS:  Classes will take advantage of case studies showing success and failure, and instructor material. We will also utilize excerpts from various books, including Competitive Advantage; Information Rules; The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation; The Master Switch: the Rise and Fall of Information Empires; The Innovator's Dilemma; The Qualcomm Equation; How We Got to Now and more. In addition, we will utilize investor relations material and various industry articles.

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE:

• Preparation, Attendance & Participation: 50%
• Written Assignments (three individual essays): 30%
• Group Project (final presentation): 20%

CAREER FIELD (WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE)

• Students wishing to work, or to deepen their work, in tech, telecom, media and related fields.
• Students working in adjacent sectors, such as consulting, accounting, investment, advertising, software and services
• Students at firms buying from or selling to telecom, media, Internet companies and IT companies.
• Students who want to deepen their understanding of Silicon Valley and the history of tech.

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES:
This course was previously known as Corporate Strategy in Telecom and Media. It is now called Strategy for the IT Firm. In substance it is Strategy for the Networked Economy. We will cover tech, telecom and media subjects, and also the changing role of IT in the enterprise. We will focus on sources of competitive advantage in tech markets. Two are from Michael Porter, and five six are added for the purpose of this class:

• Cost advantage (low-cost leader; from Porter)
• Differentiation (also from Porter): providing differentiation sufficient to justify pricing above providers providing functionally comparable products
• Ecosystem Advantage: for example, having more software developers on your OS or product; or having more providers or distributors of a technology versus other alternatives
• Talent Advantage: having the best people in your organization (Bell Labs, Google)
• Process Advantage: being able to manufacture or distribute your product in some disruptive new way (e.g. Dell and the PC; fast fashion)
• Data Advantage: having the best data set
• Channel Advantage: having more / better channel partners that can reach the end customers than your competitors (e.g. Cisco in networking; Samsung in smartphones in the US)
• Culture Advantage: this is added based on feedback from spring 2018 MBAs

We will look at cases where these apply, and also cases where new market entrants had *none* of these advantages and still successfully entered the market.

The class schedule is below. This class meets 10 times and does not meet all 15 weeks. Week refers to the week of the semester; class count refers to the class number out of 10.

• January 22 (Week 1 / Class 1):
• Part 1: Introduction, reading, goals; Sources of advantage; Bell Labs and Silicon Valley eras; Innovator's Dilemma;
• Part 2: Nokia case (and different potential outcomes for Nokia); revisiting the innovator’s dilemma; Nokia today
• NO CLASS JANUARY 29
• February  5 (Week 3 / Class 2):  
• Part 1: Porter and smartphones;  Pisano, innovation strategy (and the return of vertical integration?) Network effects, virality and retention;
• Part 2: technology platforms; the Skyhook Wireless case (when the platform eats your business)
• February 12 (Week 4 / Class 3):
• Part 1: Lock-in and switching costs; the mobile carrier ecosystem; grading network operators; Bharti Airtel case;
• Part 2: growth in saturated wireless markets; AT&T EDO case
• NO CLASS FEBRUARY 19
• February 26 (Week 6 / Class 4):  FIRST PAPER DUE
• Part 1: Standards, interoperability, migrations and disruptions; the Sprint example; “7G” selection;
• Part 2: overcoming ecosystem (dis)advantage; Qualcomm's market entry; reference customers; Qualcomm and semis today
• March 5 (Week 7 / Class 5):
• Part 1:  Government and tech innovation (Apollo, ARPANET, GPS, RFID,  DARPA, ARPA-E, In-Q-Tel); a brief history of time (and ever shrinking latency); latency-sensitive markets from finance to gaming to autonomous driving
• Part 2:  Content access today; blurring boundaries between networks, hardware and content; bundling and unbundling; Master Switch and the Kronos Cycle; mega-aggregators versus the long tail
• March 12 (Week 8 / Class 6):  SECOND PAPER DUE
• Part 1: Content acquisition costs and business model implications; Netflix teardown;
• Part 2: mobile app economy, customer touchpoints and franchise-building; business models; Rovio (Angry Birds) case
• March 19 (Week 9 / Class 7)
• Part 1: Transformations I: the shift to the cloud; freemium models; Adobe case: moving to subscriptions; ecosystem advantage
• Part 2: Transformations II: Industry 4.0; GE case (GE and the Industrial Internet); channel advantage; GE today
• March 26: NO CLASS BerkeleyHaas Spring Break
• April 2 (Week 10 / Class 8)
• Part 1: Data and the enterprise; P&G case; data advantage
• Part 2: Process advantage and replicability; the Dell case; changes in device retail; channel advantage
• April 9 (Week 11 / Class 9):  THIRD AND FINAL PAPER DUE
• Part 1: Moonshots and “new normals”; Moonshots of invention (Apollo Mission, the first cross-country call) and integration (self-driving cars); moonshots and distribution
• Part 2: Software Eats; recognizing "software eats" in your market; channel advantage, ecosystem advantage and defending your turf as an incumbent (Marriott vs Airbnb)
• NO CLASS April 16
• April 23 (Week 13 / Class 10): final presentations

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:
Jon Metzler is Lecturer at the Haas School of Business. He lectures in the EWMBA, FTMBA and UGBA programs on tech strategy and on international business (SIB: Japan, and IBD). He is also associated faculty for the UC-Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies. He has received research funding from the UCB Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and from the UCB Center for Japanese Studies. Jon has new venture creation experience in print, digital media, events, location services, edtech, services and more.  He is also founder and president of Blue Field Strategies, a consulting firm serving telecom, media and technology clients, including wireless carriers, device makers, infrastructure providers and content companies.  Previously Jon was Business Development and Government Affairs Director at Rosum Corporation, a pioneering location technology company now part of TruePosition (Liberty Media). There he handled business development in the telecom and defense sectors, government affairs, PR and standards. Jon represented Rosum in the National Emergency Number Association and Advanced Television Systems Committee (DTV standards body), and secured development funding from DARPA, among others.   Jon is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley MBA/MA-Asian Studies program. While at Haas, he co-founded the Berkeley Asia Business Conference and authored a thesis comparing new venture creation in Silicon Valley and Japan.  From 2008-2017 Jon was a research fellow for KDDI Research, the research arm of Japanese telecommunications provider KDDI. He is a faculty mentor at Berkeley Skydeck and at Terra, an ag-tech accelerator, and board chairman for the Japan Society of Northern California. He is also an advisor to various startups.  @jonjmetz