A mission is an organization’s reason for existence, its value and beliefs, and what it should be doing.

A strategy determines an organization’s basic long-term goals and objectives; including courses of action and allocation of resources in order to reach those goals.

Competitive advantage is a firm’s ability to generate superior economic performance and outperform its competitor because managers are able to create more value and meet customer needs in the marketplace.

Physical Resources: Advantages from better location, possession of raw materials, and superior machines, equipment and factories.

Human Resources: Experienced and knowledgeable management teams, skilled labor, and motivated workers.

Financial Resources: Strong financial performance, and the ability to borrow or receive credits from financial institutions.

Learning Resources: Strong research and development programs leading to innovations and superior learning processes.

General Resources: Strong brand, good reputations, superior management systems, and strong relationships with stakeholders.

A Core competence describes unique skills, knowledge, and abilities of managers and employees in value-creating activities

Specialized Resources: Functional resources are the highly skilled personnel from an organization’s various functions that must be special, unique or difficult to imitate. Another is organizational resources which are the skills that are specific to the organization such as excellent top management team and possession of valuable and scarce resources such as raw materials, land and capital assets.

Coordination ability refers to an organization’s ability to coordinate and direct its specialized resources to create the most value such as effective control systems and adaptable and open organizational culture.

Business-level strategy concerns with the competitive aspect of a firm’s products or services in its industry or market segment. It addresses how the firm can develop core competencies to exploit current opportunities, to explore new ones, or to balance between the two. Functional-level strategy concerns with developing distinctive competencies by functional areas or departments such as R&D or production as well as their ability to coordinate among various departments to provide competitive advantage.

A cost leadership strategy is adopted when a firm tries to keep costs low compared to competitors to gain market share. Products or services offered must be perceived by customers as at least comparable to competitors in the industry. Typically, the company seeks efficiency of operations (efficiency orientation) by way of technological innovations in manufacturing, economies of scale, and/or lower input costs.

A differentiation strategy is adopted when a firm seeks to be unique and distinguish its products or services from others in the industry.

The defender strategy is concerned with stability by aggressively seeking to hold on to current customers. This can be done with competitive pricing or producing high quality products.

An analyzer strategy aims to maintain the best of both defender and prospector strategies by maintaining stability and efficiency through stable products and market areas, while pursuing flexibility and growth for new products or new markets. The prospector strategy on the other hand is to innovate and to grow by finding and exploiting new products and new opportunities. It is almost the opposite of the defender strategy.

Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS): A method for producing goods using machines and computerized systems that is readily adaptable to changes in the type and quantity of the product being manufactured to improve process efficiency.

Lean Manufacturing: Involves continuous efforts by highly trained employees to reduce waste and improve quality at every stage of production process.

Just-in-time inventory system: An inventory management system aims to only have parts in inventory that are needed to make enough finished goods to meet immediate demand where parts are ordered and delivered to factory floor at the time they are needed.

Social Networking:the use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and wikis to provide communication channels where people interact in an online community and share personal and professional information and opinions.

Big Data Analytic: the process of examining large and varied data sets such as text, photos and video to uncover hidden patterns, correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful information.

Internet of Things (IoT): the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and connectivity which enables these objects to connect and exchange data.

Production 

Marketing & Sales

Research and Development (R&D) 

Information Systems

PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT

Tall structure, Centralization of authority, Standardization, Strict hierarchy of authority, Mechanistic form

R&D DEPARTMENT

Flat structure, Decentralization of authority, Few rules and informal workplace, Collaborative teamwork, Organic form

A focus business-level strategy would put all their efforts and resources to serve a narrow segment of a market well.

A strategic alliance is any cooperative efforts of two or more organizations to achieve strategic objectives of developing, producing or selling products or services. An alliance creates values by leveraging complementary resources and capabilities of all firms for mutually beneficial gains.

A corporate-level strategy defines the scope of the firm or the organizational domain in which it competes. With a direction of growth, a firm can apply existing core competencies in creating value to a new market or a related industry. Internal growth can occur in an existing or a new business when an organization increases revenues, production capacity, and its workforce. External growth can be made through mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances or partnerships. Two important forms of external growth are vertical integration (backward and forward) and diversification (related and unrelated).

Factor conditions;

a nation’s factors of production such as skilled labor. Factor conditions that are important are often not inherited (natural resources are inherited) but are created such as highly skilled employees, scientific and specialized knowledge, and the ability to innovate.

Demand conditions;

home market demand for an industry’s products or services. Demand conditions of the home market especially when the buyer’s needs anticipate or shape those of other countries (i.e. global trends).

Related and supporting industries;

that are internationally competitive, for example, home-based suppliers who can deliver cost effective inputs, especially those that can provide innovations along with long-term working relationships.

Firm strategy, structure, and rivalry;

that govern how companies are created, organized and managed as well as the nature of domestic rivalry. For example, powerful domestic rivalry can have a large positive stimulating effect on all firms in an industry by putting pressures for constant upgrading of the sources of competitive advantage.

Employee and management performance goals 

Employee and management development goals

Financial and physical resources goals 

Performance goals

Innovation goals

Market goals

Social responsibility goals