A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
Marketing management is the organizational discipline which focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.
Competitive analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. Profiling combines all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.
Porter's generic strategies describe how a company pursues competitive advantage across its chosen market scope. There are three/four generic strategies, either lower cost, differentiated, or focus. A company chooses to pursue one of two types of competitive advantage, either via lower costs than its competition or by differentiating itself along dimensions valued by customers to command a higher price. A company also chooses one of two types of scope, either focus or industry-wide, offering its product across many market segments. The generic strategy reflects the choices made regarding both the type of competitive advantage and the scope. The concept was described by Michael Porter in 1980.
Marketing strategy is an organization's promotional efforts to allocate its resources across a wide range of platforms, channels to increase its sales and achieve sustainable competitive advantage within its corresponding market.
A strategic alliance is an agreement between two or more parties to pursue a set of agreed upon objectives needed while remaining independent organizations.
A strategic partnership is a relationship between two commercial enterprises, usually formalized by one or more business contracts. A strategic partnership will usually fall short of a legal partnership entity, agency, or corporate affiliate relationship. Strategic partnerships can take on various forms from shake hand agreements, contractual cooperation's all the way to equity alliances, either the formation of a joint venture or cross-holdings in each other.
The resource-based view (RBV) is a managerial framework used to determine the strategic resources a firm can exploit to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.
Strategic communication can mean either communicating a concept, a process, or data that satisfies a long-term strategic goal of an organization by allowing facilitation of advanced planning, or communicating over long distances usually using international telecommunications or dedicated global network assets to coordinate actions and activities of operationally significant commercial, non-commercial and military business or combat and logistic subunits. It can also mean the related function within an organization, which handles internal and external communication processes. Strategic communication can also be used for political warfare.
A business partner is a commercial entity with which another commercial entity has some form of alliance. This relationship may be a contractual, exclusive bond in which both entities commit not to ally with third parties. Alternatively, it may be a very loose arrangement designed largely to impress customers and competitors with the size of the network that the business partners belong to.
David John Teece is a New Zealand-born US-based organizational economist and the Professor in Global Business and director of the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
In organizational theory, dynamic capability is the capability of an organization to purposefully adapt an organization's resource base. The concept was defined by David Teece, Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen, in their 1997 paper Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management, as the firm’s ability to engage in adapting, integrating, and reconfiguring internal and external organizational skills, resources, and functional competences to match the requirements of a changing environment.
A business network refers to a complex, enduring, and interdependent webs of business relationships among market and non-market actors that allow firms to co-create value in their business environment. Firms influence their markets by managing and signalling their network positions, facilitating entry of new actors, or removing other actors, for instance, through disintermediation, which means elimitating the middleman.
Complementarity assets is defined as “the total economic value added by combining certain complementary factors in a production system, exceeding the value that would be generated by applying these production factors in isolation.” Thus two assets are said to be complements when investment in one asset increases the marginal return on the other. On the contrary, assets are substitutes when investment in one does not affect the marginal return of the other.
Corporate venture capital (CVC) is the investment of corporate funds directly in external startup companies. CVC is defined by the Business Dictionary as the "practice where a large firm takes an equity stake in a small but innovative or specialist firm, to which it may also provide management and marketing expertise; the objective is to gain a specific competitive advantage." Examples of CVCs include GV and Intel Capital.
For international trade, Foreign market entry modes are the ways in which a company can expand its services into a non-domestic market.
An international joint venture (IJV) occurs when two businesses based in two or more countries form a partnership. A company that wants to explore international trade without taking on the full responsibilities of cross-border business transactions has the option of forming a joint venture with a foreign partner. International investors entering into a joint venture minimize the risk that comes with an outright acquisition of a business. In international business development, performing due diligence on the foreign country and the partner limits the risks involved in such a business transaction.
Yves Doz is a French academic. He is a professor of strategic management at INSEAD, where he holds the Solvay Chaired Professorship of Technological Innovation, and is a Fellow of CEDEP. His research interests focus on innovation, the strategy and organization of multinational corporations, strategic alliances, and on how business organizations can develop the capability to adapt quickly to changes in competitive environments. More recently, he has been working with a number of national governments on strategic adaptability and agility. He is the author of numerous books and articles, which include the first comprehensive book on strategic alliances, co-authored with Gary Hamel, and the Multinational Mission, co-authored with CK Prahalad.
Cooperative Strategy refers to a planning strategy in which two or more firms work together in order to achieve a common objective. Several companies apply cooperative strategies to increase their profits through cooperation with other companies that stop being competitors.
