Core Insights: Strategy Warwick Business School

Core Insights host Trevor Barnes talks to Jeff Reuer, Distinguished Research Environment Professor at Warwick Business School and the Guggenheim Endowed Chair and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado. Professor Reuer explains how R&D partnerships are both necessary and can be done without either company exposing their trade secrets to each other. He has researched how knowledge leaks in these sort of partnerships and puts forward four ways in which companies can make sure any partnership they enter remains water tight.  Read more on the subject here and why companies partnering with their closest rival can actually work well here.

Companies have been falling victim to the competency trap for many years, most notably Kodak, which failed to anticipate the switch to digital cameras in time and disappeared from our lives. Jerker Denrell, Professor of Behavioural Science, explains to Core Insights host Trevor Barnes just what the competency trap is and how firms can avoid it,  detailing the mindset and steps needed. Read more on how to avoid the competency trap here.

Research by Sotirios Paroutis, Professor of Strategic Management, has found the much-derided PowerPoint is in fact a vital tool in the development of strategy, giving meaning and understanding to the abstract ideas contained in many company's vision. Professor Paroutis tells Core Insights host Trevor Barnes how his Visuals Strategy Framework can help those building a strategy to maximise their presentations with the right visuals and information to bring clarity and agreement.  Read more on the Visuals Strategy Framework here.

Strategy is moving out of the C-suite. More and more companies are involving not just their executives, but employees on the shopfloor and even stakeholders outside of the firm to devise their strategy. Christina Wawarta, Associate Fellow at Warwick Business School and Senior Manager Corporate Strategy at Europe's biggest home appliances manufacturer BSH, explains how open strategy works and its advantages. She also details the tools companies will need to carry out their own open strategy process to Core Insights host Trevor Barnes. For more on open strategy read 'Six lessons on open strategy from Wikimedia' and 'What tools do firms need for open strategy'.

Over nine years Sotirios Paroutis and Luciano Oviedo were able to go behind the scenes at Cisco and see how the company reacted to the emergence of Amazon Web Services' cloud platform that disrupted its established business model. Cisco was able to come back and Core Insights host Trevor Barnes interviews the pair to find out the five lessons they learned through their research that other companies can use to come back from a disruptive innovation. Read more on the research here.

Christian Stadler, Professor of Strategic Management, has spent many years studying Europe's century-old firms. Listen to this podcast with Core Insights host Trevor Barnes to discover what he learned about building enduring success and the common themes that has seen companies like Shell,  Allianz, Siemens and Legal & General prosper for so long. Professor Stadler details the four principles that can help companies lay the foundations for developing a sustainable competitive advantage. Read more about Professor Stadler's research on enduring success here. You can also read his book on the subject, plus, Professor Stadler reveals the five reads you need to build a strategy in uncertain times like the current global pandemic.