Competitive Advantage - Analysis

A stylized chessboard with a knight and a pawn dominating the foreground, symbolizing competitive advantage analysis in business

Description:

Building on your initial analysis of the Ryanair’s budget airline business, this activity challenges you to delve deeper into the competitive advantage Analysis. You’ll apply step 4 (“Explore Options and Make Choices”) of the four-step competitive advantage analysis framework introduced in the “Competitive Advantage”.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this activity, you will be able to:

  • Analyze the competitive advantage of a business.
  • Relate value chain activities to customer willingness-to-pay and supplier opportunity costs.
  • Identify and evalutate changes in value chain activities to enhance competitive advantage.

Steps:

  1. Recall and Review: Recall the insights from the “What’s Your Advantage?” activity, including your catlog of value chain activities and the how the activities are tied to customer willingness-to-pay and supplier opportunity costs.
  2. Brainstorm Changes:
    • Identify relevant competitors (use information from the video, perform an internet search, or research using an AI assistant and verify the results).
    • Identify the “essential driver” for Ryanair and its competitor (See page 25 from the Competitive Advantage reading).
    • Use the approaches highlighted in the reading to brainstorm possible changes to Ryanair’s value chain activities
  3. Identify Activity Linkages:
    • Any change to a value chain activity to align it better with a customer’s Willingness-to-pay factor or reduce supplier’s opportunity costs must be preserve or improve internal consistency to be successful.
    • Evaluate the impact on internal consistency of your proposed changes.
    • Helpful Hint: Refer to Section 2.3.5 of the “Competitive Advantage” reading for a discussion on interaction among activities and its consequences for “ruggedness of the landscape”.
  4. Enhance Advantage:
    • Outline specific value chain activities that the company could modify to enhance its competitive advantage.

Deliverables:

  • Engage in a rich and interactive discussion with your group, sharing your analysis and recommendations.
  • Be prepared to share your insights with the rest of the class, building on the diverse perspectives and industry definitions from the previous activity.

Remember: This is an in-class learning activity designed to facilitate discussion and deepen your understanding. The primary deliverable is active participation and insightful contributions to the group and class discussions.