Ramon Casadesus-Masanell

Together with Prof. Daniel F. Spulber (Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University), I edit the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy (JEMS), the leading academic journal on the economics of strategy. JEMS is based at Harvard Business School, where Bailey Herrera Samayoa (bherrerasamayoa@hbs.edu) serves as the editorial assistant. 

JEMS provides a leading forum for scholarly interaction and research on the competitive strategies of managers and the organizational structure of firms. The journal features theoretical and empirical industrial organization, innovation economics, and management strategy. JEMS also publishes articles on the subject of international business and economics, including articles dealing with industries in economies outside the United States. JEMS is an important resource for economists in economics departments and in schools of business and management, including departments of finance, managerial economics, accounting, marketing, organization behavior and management strategy. In addition, the journal serves as a valuable resource for managers and managerial consultants seeking up-to-date research on management strategy. The journal provides practitioners a means of access to innovative economic research on the theory of the firm. JEMS impacts research and influences other journals in industrial organization and management. JEMS also impacts management. An article in Fortune magazine called the journal a “showcase for the new research.” JEMS published a number of path-breaking special issues on accounting, marketing, telecommunications, market design, the industrial organization of health care, and the spectrum auctions, incentives and organization of the firm, and innovative directions in management strategy.

• JEMS website: http://editjems.org/
• JEMS on twitter:  @jemsjournal 
• JEMS on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jemsjournal

Strategic Brew simulates real life challenges facing the strategist. It allows users to experience and internalize the process of strategy formulation, execution, and communication in a simulated context and to see how these processes interplay with other factors such as competition and team dynamics.  Users are in charge of running a beer brewery and are responsible for making decisions that will shape their businesses. They are handed the company reins in the first quarter of the year and can make decisions in any of six functional areas: Product Design, Capacity Planning, Manufacturing, Distribution, Advertising, and Pricing. The game progresses in 3-month rounds.  The objective of the game is to develop a strategy that maximizes profit while operating the brewery as an ongoing business concern. 

• This page contains detailed information on Strategic Brew. It includes a number of videos that illustrate the use of the simulation.
• You may download the user manual by clicking here. 
• A detailed technical manual is also available upon request. If you are an instructor considering the use of Strategic Brew, you may request a courtesy copy (casadesus@gmail.com).

I study strategic interaction between organizations that operate different business models.

Building on the literatures on competitive positioning and the theory of industrial organization, my work seeks to tackle previously unaddressed questions by studying situations where firms compete in dissimilar ways. Some examples of these questions include:

1. Should record companies decrease their prices in their competition against peer-to-peer file sharing networks?
2. Does the disruptive nature of open source software imply that it will win its battle against proprietary software? 
3. Should established software firms confronting open source startups increase or decrease their level of openness?
4. Should Apple change its stance and include advertisements in iTunes to respond to ad-sponsored startups such as Grooveshark or Spotify? 

These questions illustrate the three areas that my research covers: tactical interaction, strategic interaction, and the analysis of advantage in isolation.

The  words  “business  model”  are  inescapable  in  our  daily  fare of  business  news.  These  two ubiquitous words seemed to effortlessly rise up to prominence during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. When businesspeople, journalists, academics, and other observers could not easily relate to “new economy” businesses given the difficulty of pointing to specific assets and tangible products, they  needed  something  to  latch  on  to.  That  something  became  “the  business  model.”  When companies produced valuations with frenzied multiples, people justified the future profit potential through “the business model.” Later, when that potential was wiped away, savants confidently proclaimed, “The business model was simply not viable.”

The popularity of describing success and failure through business models has stayed with us. Today, when companies fail, journalists write that the business model was flawed. Contrarily, if a company continues to beat quarterly forecasts, analysts jubilantly write about the advantage realized through the company’s business model.

But, strangely, for all of this talk about “business models,” it’s hard to find a common operating definition. To some, business models are ephemeral flights of fancy created by a backroom business engineer, and to others business models are static foundations etched in stone. Many assume that just mentioning the business model of a particular company will engender in everyone a common understanding of how that business model works.

In this course, we aim to give an operational definition of “business model” and provide a set of tools  to  determine  the  business  model  for  any  organization.  We  relate  business  models  to  the “engine” of an organization (i.e., how it works). By studying how it works, we’re able to apply the same technique to both for-profit and not-for-profit firms. The cases take us around the world to industries as diverse as computer software and hardware, cellular telephony, commercial aircraft, airlines, apparel, aluminum, pulp and paper, retail stores, consumer packaged goods, environmental NGOs, cults, and even art auction houses.

This course is for students who want to                                                 

• be able to quickly determine the business model of any organization;

• ascertain how a particular business model helps the organization create and capture value over time;

• understand how business models of different organizations interact; and

• learn how to improve a business model.

Regardless of your intended career path after graduation, understanding business models will place you in good stead. For those who wish to pursue investment banking or private equity, you will be constantly pressed to understand that “engine” which produces profits. In a consulting career, you’ll be assigned to find fixes—and it will be hard to fix anything without understanding how the business model works. Finally, if you opt for a career in industry, whatever company, discipline, and position you find yourself in, you’ll have to be able to understand the context in which you operate and how your actions fit into the policies, assets, and decision making of the firm.

The objective of this course is to help students develop the skills for formulating strategy. It provides an understanding of:

• A firm's operative environment and how to sustain competitive advantage.
• How to generate superior value for customers by designing the optimum configuration of the product mix and functional activities.
• How to balance the opportunities and risks associated with dynamic and uncertain changes in industry attractiveness and competitive position.

Students learn to:

• Develop a mastery of a body of analytical tools and the ability to take an integrative point of view.
• Use these tools to perform in-depth analyses of industries and competitors, predict competitive behavior, and analyze how firms develop and sustain competitive advantage over time.
• Particular attention is paid to competitive positioning; understanding comparative costs; and addressing issues such as cannibalization, network externalities, and globalization.

Professor Casadesus-Masanell teaches the MBA Required Curriculum Strategy Course, as well as an MBA Elective Curriculum course called, "Competing Through Business Models."