Faculty
Ioanna Constantiou

Course Coordinator
Ioanna Constantiou

The course focuses on the development of market strategies by entrepreneurs operating in the Information Technologies markets. Focusing on decision making under uncertainty specific business decision will be analysed. The Information technology markets will be the focused of the course, as they offer a dynamic and information rich environment to investigate market strategy development by entrepreneurs. The recent technological developments such as Web 2.0 applications offer new business opportunities through, for example, the proliferation of social networking, blogs, wikis, crowdsourcing etc.

Specific market strategies and business decisions will be analysed using behavioural decision making models. For example, commercialisation strategy of new products, trust building, expectation management, user community building, outsourcing contract negotiations, escalating commitment to investments, as well as using customers as co-creators.

The course will be conducted in sessions of three time-slots (3x45). Each session is strongly based on students’ participation. Following the introduction, each session includes lectures presenting specific theoretical issues, practical examples to further the understanding of the theory as well as students’ participation in the discussions about specific business cases.

During the course the students will develop analytical skills and abilities to assess business decisions. Thereby, they will improve their capabilities to engage in individual and group decision making under uncertainty and solve specific business problems. Upon completion of the course the students will be able to develop and present concrete solutions to market problems and advise firms on strategy making in the Information Technologies markets.

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:

1 Explain how behavioural decision making is applied in strategy making in the Information and Technologies markets, through examples based on business cases.

2 Use a set of theoretical tools to analyse prominent business decisions in the Information Technology markets.

3 Identify and reflect upon the strategic implications of the analysed business decisions for the entrepreneur.

Synopsis (max 5 pages) with Oral individual exam (20 min) -Internal second examiner

Max H. Bazerman; Don A. Moore (2008). Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, John Wiley & Sons, Edition 7th .

Jeff Jarvis (2009). What would Google do?, HarperCollins Publishers, NY.