EMBA J22 Strategy and Innovation Assignment

Unsettled opportunity space: Towards value, advantage

The paper for Strategy and Innovation (S&I) involves a core analytic task: Identify an unsettled ‘opportunity space’ with resonance, relevance for your professional development and/or about which you are curious, then work through three issues below. Be sure to scope the project in ways appropriate for analysis in the context of the Strategy and Innovation content and also at feasible scale. The focus could be a ‘emerging technology’, other shifts (e.g., regulatory) that upset an incumbent settled space, recognition of inchoate demand to be consolidated, a nascent market, or other starting points relevant to S&I content.

Section 1: Brief introduction and initial assessment

Assess the current situation / status quo: Complete an initial landscape analysis of current and potential players, incumbent ‘system(s)’, key interdependencies – and opportunities. What is the ‘unsettled space’? In a sentence or a few, please provide your initial view of the ‘why unsettled’. You may like to discuss specifically Geroski on why early moments matter, how these dynamics play out.

Ground the overall ‘space’ in some specifics – e.g., not ‘crowdfunding’ but some more specific focus: For example ‘equity crowd-funding in the UK’ [or e.g., crowdfunding for arts philanthropy, or crowdfunding for early /invention funding]; and not ‘Artificial intelligence’ but some contextually-specific use of AI tools and capabilities as in digital advertising, or satellite edge computing, or a similarly focused topic. Such specifics make the project manageable in scope, with a more complete analysis, which will increase your learning from the time, effort invested.

Section 2: Analysis

Analyse challenges, opportunities to understand the context, conditions of unsettled technologies, nascent markets and not-yet-imagined markets, missing/needed of org capabilities. These are the starting frames of reference to engage course concepts that you use to ‘see’ analytic issues in the unsettled space and move from your initial assessment.

Please pay attention to insights from context/PESTEL analysis and make use of TechnologyMarkets-Organisational capabilities tools.

Section 3: Recommendations

Based on your work in sections 1 and 2, please identify a single ecosystem player – a social actor relevant to this unsettled space (e.g., incumbent firm, challenge firm, investor, regulator, provider of complementary assets), to which/to whom you will address strategic recommendations. Best if you have a specific firm or agency or startup in mind, again to ground your analysis. Discuss the current situation of that player, then develop 5-7 recommendations, each with brief concept-based rationale for action to ‘settle’ the unsettled space to advantage of that ecosystem player.

Please include a short ‘methods’ appendix that describes, in succinct form, the gist of insights from conversations with 3 or 4 experts (no need for transcripts).

These could be direct conversations (preferred for building your own social capital) or excerpts from blog posts, industry publications, or related sources to deepen and enrich your analysis. The word limit for the assignment is 3,000 words. The word count covers the main body of text, including in-text citations, direct quotations, tables, figures, and diagrams, and excluding appendices, footnotes, reference list and bibliography.