Fundamentals of Strategy
You know the vocabulary. Now learn the language.
Price
$690.00 CAD
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Start anytime.
10 hours 
Online Self-Paced Business strategy is more than terminology—it's a language that shapes decisions, drives differentiation, and defines competitive success. This course introduces you to the established lexicon of strategy: industry structure, competitive positioning, and differentiation. It grounds these elements in data you’ve likely never encountered and illustrates them in ways you won’t forget.
But fluency requires more than vocabulary. This course goes beyond the basics, offering an extensive body of original, creative, and proven insights. It equips you to become a native speaker of strategy, ready to navigate the conversations that will shape your business career.
Course Structure
The course is organized into four parts:
- Goals: Understand how industry forces shape strategic possibilities
- Value Proposition: Learn how positioning, customer connection, and differentiation drive customer choice
- Implementation: Master value chain configuration to reliably create and capture value
- Limits: Discover when to persist, pivot, or adopt entirely new tools for strategic challenges
Uniquely, this course features candid interviews with Bill Hunter (CEO) and Jeff Gross (CTO), co-founders of Canary Medical. Their real-time application of the course framework in scaling a Canadian medical-device company—launching its first product, a smart knee implant, in 2023—offers a rare, live perspective. This isn’t a static case study; it’s strategy in action.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Analyze industry structure using Porter's Five Forces to set strategic goals grounded in competitive realities
- Map competitive positions, connect with customers via the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework, and craft differentiated strategies competitors can’t easily replicate
- Evaluate value chain decisions and apply principles like "better before cheaper" and "revenue before cost" to create and capture value
- Distinguish between situations requiring strategic persistence, strategic change, or entirely new approaches
- Recognize the boundary strategy problems and innovation problems and know which one you're facing
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This self-paced course includes approximately 10 hours of content, designed to be completed within a 90-day window. You’ll progress through interactive modules, complete knowledge checks, and receive instant feedback through our AI-first Learning Management System.
PART 1: GOALS
Session 1: What Is Strategy
The four-part framework that organizes the course. Meet Bill Hunter and Jeff Gross of Canary Medical, whose strategic decisions will illustrate every concept that follows.
Session 2: Industry Forces
How industry structure shapes the extent of the possible. Use Five Forces analysis to set goals grounded in competitive reality, not aspiration alone.
PART 2: VALUE PROPOSITION
Session 3: Industry Position
Map companies on the productivity frontier. Understand the risk/return profiles of high-end, mid-market, and price-sensitive positions -- and why "stuck in the middle" is more nuanced than it sounds, and not nearly as bad as you’ve been told.
Session 4: Connecting with Customers
Apply the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to understand why customers hire one product over another, and why traditional segmentation often misleads.
Session 5: Differentiation from Competitors
The four dimensions of performance -- functionality, reliability, convenience, and price -- and how companies build advantages that competitors struggle to replicate.
PART 3: IMPLEMENTATION
Session 6: Value Chain and Firm Scope
The make-or-buy decision, from Ford's coal mines to today's AI chip wars. When vertical integration creates value, and when it destroys it.
Session 7: Create Value
Why "better before cheaper" (offering superior value not lower price) is the most reliable path to exceptional performance, a conclusion drawn from the study of 45 years of data on more than 25,000 companies.
Session 8: Capture Value
Why "revenue before cost" is how exceptional companies sustain superior financial performance, and why stock price is a dangerously misleading scorecard.
PART 4: LIMITS
Session 9: Persistence
The hedgehog's wisdom: why strategic constraints protect as much as they confine. Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, and the siren song of easy growth.
Session 10: Change
The fox's cunning: strategic drift vs. strategic overreach. How Heartland Express changed everything and stayed the same. Why Starbucks, Nike, Boeing, and Lego lost their way -- and how some found it again.
Session 11: The End of Strategy
Operations is doing something right. Strategy is doing something different. Innovation is doing something new. Conclude the course by tracing Southwest Airlines' fifty-year arc across this triptych, from upstart to incumbent, and grapple, as they are, with the open question of what comes next.
Duration: ~10 hours (self-paced)
Access: 90 days from start date
Certificate: Digital credential upon completion
No prerequisites required. Enroll anytime and learn at your own pace.
This course is for people who use the word "strategy" and want it to mean something. No prior strategy coursework is required.
You're likely to find the course especially rewarding if you:
- Have been in strategy conversations and afterward wondered if everyone, including you, really understood what they were saying
- Encounter “new” approaches to strategy and find them incomplete or difficult to apply, and don’t know how to integrate them into what you already understand and use
- Want to contribute meaningfully and consistently to the most important strategy discussions in your organization
- Are looking for a way to talk about strategy that is simple, rigorous, and useful
Michael Raynor
Associate Professor, Strategy
Dr. Michael E. Raynor focuses on the challenges of strategy, innovation, and managing uncertainty. For more than 30 years, he has contributed to the advancement of management practice through research and consulting across a range of industries.
His has written four books, includingThe Innovator's Solution and The Strategy Paradox which are critically-acclaimed bestsellers (New York Times, Globe & Mail), and all of which have been international award winners (BusinessWeek, Financial Times). He has published more than one hundred articles and monographs that have shaped management discourse over decades, appearing in many of the world's leading outlets (Harvard Business Review, Strategic Management Journal).
Michael educates future and current business leaders in Ivey's full-time, part-time and executive programs. A consultant for more than 25 years, 15 as a Managing Director with Deloitte, he has broken new ground in applying his insights to address the defining challenges of many of the world's leading organizations in life sciences, medical devices, telecommunications, high technology, financial services, media, and consumer products. He has helped clients with competitive and corporate strategy, product and service innovation, risk management.
Most recently, Michael has been working to accelerate global decarbonization through transformative new emissions-reduction strategies for hard-to-abate industrial sectors. He aims to continue working with the most ambitious organizations to bring inventive new ideas to bear on the world’s most challenging problems.
From theory to practice: Raynor is also the co-founder of S3 Markets, an Austin, Texas-based venture focused on accelerating decarbonization in hard-to-abate sectors by transforming carbon markets to empower corporate climate action. And he is a founding investor and senior advisor to Canary Medical, a Vancouver-based med-tech company that combines smart implantable medical devices with artificial intelligence to improve patient outcomes and revolutionize healthcare.
Michael has a doctorate from the Harvard Business School, where he was recognized with the Dively Award for research excellence; an MBA with distinction from Ivey Business School, where he received the Nelson M. Davis Memorial Scholarship; and an undergraduate degree in Philosophy magna cum laude from Harvard University, where he was a Detur Prize winner.
Courses
Start anytime.
Complete at your own pace.
| Length | Learning Method | Tuition Fees |
|---|---|---|
| 10 hours | Online Self-Paced | $690.00 CAD |
Enrollment and Payment FAQs
Click “Enroll Now” on the course page and follow the prompts to complete your registration.
We accept major credit cards. You’ll be prompted to select your preferred method during checkout.
- For Cohort programs - 30 Days Before Program Start
- Cancellation: You will receive a full refund of the program fee.
- Transfer to a Later Date: No fees apply.
- Less than 30 Days Before Program Start
- Cancellation: Incurs a 25% cancellation fee.
- Transfer to a Later Date: Incurs a 15% transfer fee.
- Once the cohort is live, the program is non-refundable and cannot be transferred to a later date.
- Compassionate exceptions: Fees may be waived on compassionate grounds, please contact online@ivey.ca
- Unredeemed transfers: If not used within 12 months, the full program fee is forfeited.
No, the purchaser and the person taking the course must match to ensure the digital credential is given to the correct person.
Yes, please contact online@ivey.ca and we will set up a group invoice.
Certification and Credentials
Yes. You’ll receive a digital certificate from Ivey Business School upon successful completion of the course.
Ivey’s certificates are widely respected and can be added to your LinkedIn profile or resume.
Upon completion, you’ll receive a secure digital credential directly to your email, that can be shared and verified online.
Self-Paced Course Structure and Experience
This is a self-paced, asynchronous course with interactive modules, quizzes, and AI-powered feedback.
You’ll have access for 90 days from the start date.
Approximately 10 hours in total. You can complete it at your own pace over the course of 90 days.
There are no formal exams. You’ll complete quizzes and knowledge checks with unlimited attempts.
This course is self-directed and does not include instructor-led live sessions. You may interact with other students through online activities.
