Overview of the Course

The disruptive power of digital technologies is day after day clearer and stronger. Entire industries have been challenged by new companies that approached the market leveraging unconventional strategies, without traditional assets and often without a clear regulation frame. Examples like the taxi industry, the hotels and the media are just the beginning. Uber approached the market without owning any taxi, AirBnb offers accommodations all over the world - in big and small cities - without owning any room or apartment and finally, social medias offer any kind of content leveraging crowd generated contents, and these are just the most famous examples.

Behind all these innovations there is a common trait: the enabling role of digital technologies. The chance to have a continuous and obliquus access to the internet and the incredible computational power of smartphones are the two basic characteristics that allows these new born companies to leverage the opportunities of non-owned assets to develop their own business model.

The course is a unique journey in the strategy and innovation landscape, aiming to develop capabilities and skills to handle the challenges and opportunities of the digital technology in its disruption process. 

The course is based on three main unconventional assets:

• A company-based perspective: Ing. Francesco Caio is among the founders and first CEO of Omnitel and had several executive roles in national and international companies (Merloni, Cable and Wirless, Lehman Brothers Europe, Avio, Poste Italian and others), serving also as consultant for the Italian and the English government to design digitalisation strategies.
• A double perspective based on established and new born companies: the course is designed to show both how established companies may use digital technology to foster innovation, to survive and to grow in the competitive scenario, as well as to understand the challenges and opportunities of new born companies that leverage this kind of technology to offer their products or services.
• A learning experience based on doing: the lectures are designed to combine in the same day i) theoretical insights coming from the theories of the leading scholars in the field, ii) empirical insights derived from on-the-edge real cases and iii) insights coming from direct work to propose your own perspective on real challenges through team-work experiences

The course is based on three main blocks:

• Basics of Strategy and Technology Innovation: the first block is designed to have the basic vocabulary of strategy and innovation, referring to the traditional theories and cases that serves as inspiration also in the current competitive environment.
• The strategic dimension of Digital Innovation: the second part of the course is designed to understand how digital technologies are challenging traditional theories and offering new opportunities from an innovation perspective.
• The organisational dimension of Digital Innovation: the last part of the course is designed to understand the organisational impact of digital technology, in terms of organisational culture and leadership.

Faculty

Professor:

• Prof. Francesco Caio – francesco.caio@polimi.it 

Teaching Assistant:

• Ing. Daniel Trabucchi - daniel.trabucchi@polimi.it

Suggested pre-requisite

Strategy MOOC on the POK platform, this course introduces the key theories, concepts, models and approaches related to Strategy at a Corporate, Business and Functional/Operational level. (Available at: https://www.pok.polimi.it/courses/course-v1:Polimi+STR101+2017_M9/about)

Slides / Business Cases / Videos

Slides, tools, business cases and videos will be made available through Course website on BeeP.

Educational Process 

The underlying assumption of the course is that innovation and strategic capabilities cannot be learnt through textbooks and lectures, therefore a strong involvement of the students is going to be required, through discussions and team based experiences.

Most of the lectures are going to be based on 4 main parts:

• Brief lecture on the theoretical concepts
• Discussion of a (short) real case directly related to the theoretical concepts
• Team work on a real case, answering to strategic and innovation questions and challenges
• Brief team presentation of the solution or the strategy that the team would implement to overcome the given challenge

Some of the lectures will be based on a slightly different structure, involving for example guest speakers to increase even more the real world orientation of the course.

Main Topics

Basics of Strategy and Technology Innovation:

• Fundamentals of Strategy
• Tools for competitive analysis
• The innovator dilemma: legacy VS new
• The innovator dilemma: the concept of disruption
• Strategic alternative to manage innovation 

The strategic dimension of Digital Innovation:

• The impact of the digital world: challenging traditional theories through digital innovation
• Challenges and opportunities of new born companies: the phenomenon of Sharing Economy and Digital Platforms
• The digitalisation process of established companies: real examples from real experiences

The organisational dimension of Digital Innovation:

• The impact of digital technology on the organisation
• Shifting the organisational culture
• Leadership skills to guide a digital world 

Groups

Each member of the class will be assigned by the faculty to a self-managed learning team. During the first class students will be asked to fulfil a survey to help the faculty creating the groups. Professors will look for diversity among team members.

Be aware that each team member will have to evaluate the contribution provided by the rest of the team to its final outputs. During the evaluation of the projects, the faculty will take into account if a team has had to accomplish its projects without the participation of someone of its assigned members. Thus, if a team experiences lack of contribution by any of the team members, the issue must be discussed with the main Professor of the section to which the team belongs.

The whole course is designed to propose simulated challenges that students will face in their professional experience, developing a theoretical and practical knowledge that may be give you a new asset. Therefore, the entire course is based on the basic mechanisms used in most of the companies: team working. For this reason, the evaluation is going to be based mainly on the outputs presented during the classes after the team work.

In order to consider the contribution of the single student, the participation during the team works is mandatory (peculiar issues are going to be considered chance by chance) moreover a final individual assignment is going to be required.

Deliverables

• During each team experiences, the students will be asked to think and to propose a solution or to take decision on issues inspired by real world cases.

At the end of the lecture a brief presentation is going to be delivered and evaluated, the slides are going to be delivered as well for a further consideration.  

Delivery:

o   Presentation and slides: at the end of each class (starting from Lecture #2)

• A few weeks before the end of the course each student will propose a topic which is particularly interested in. Once the topic is accepted by the Professor, each single student is going to develop an assignment showing four main elements: i) a brief overview on the topic, ii) insights coming from real cases, iii) a conceptualisation of the topic according to the main theoretical aspects emerged during the course and iv) a personal critical assessment on the topic to show his/her ability of critically read a phenomenon.

o   Individual assignment: last day of the course (June 8^th, 2018)

Final Grade

The final evaluation will be mainly based on the development of the project, but not only:

• 70% - Team-based presentations and deliveries (average)
• 30% - Individual assignment

After the end of the course, the forthcoming exam calls are going to be based:

• 30% - A new individual assignment
• 70% - An oral exam

Inspiring book

Inspiring book

Inspiring book