At the end of the fall quarter, we finally made it to our final exams. It was time to review what we already knew, think about what we had learned and combine knowledge across disciplines, honing our skills in comprehensive thinking, as an entrepreneur should do.
For this blog I want to share more about TEM 401: Economics, Marketing and Strategy, my favorite class. Economics is a science to satisfy both human needs and wants in an efficient way under “Pareto Efficiency”, providing us with a foundation for understanding the mechanism of the economic marketplace and how a company should react to survive among the fierce competition. Studying both consumer and firm behaviors and learning how they interact with each other helped us thoroughly analyze the problem and determine the demand and supply conditions in the market by solving the equilibrium analysis. Further, we predicted the outcomes of interactions among participants with interdependent payoffs by using Game Theory to model the behavior of each individual.
If you have a company, how can your company survive price competition without killing all the profit? What are your strategy and tactics? How do you identify the determinants of market structure? Output levels? Price? What are customers’ concerns and what do they benefit from? How do you promote and place your company? After building on the economic models, we explored these market issues with the 3C-STP-4P models through real case studies and business write-ups, going far beyond the textbooks.
Our final project was a case analysis. During the project, we learned that operating a company successfully is overwhelmingly difficult. We needed to know the exact needs of the customer and how we could benefit them directly through our products and services with our own sources and strength. How we position and differentiate ourselves compared to the competitors were also crucial issues. After figuring these out, we needed to deal with thorny follow-up questions on the company’s strategy and tactics. Which are exactly the right strategy and tactics? Who knows!
If TEM 440 Screening Technical Opportunities just tells you how to start a company, TEM 401 teaches you how to run a start-up company profitably in the long run. Maintaining is harder than starting.
Entrepreneurship is like a mountain that’s too big to climb, but that’s also why it is so rewarding.
– Jill Jin ’15 (MS)