2.

5 - 3-minute presentation - teacher likes the value chain, but not

the vrio table

Deliverables:
Choose a suitable article or research paper or podcast or video within
the past five years that features a business or businesses, for-profit or
not, or an industry in Canada or worldwide, and clearly and
substantively relate its content to concepts and terminology found
in any of the chapters, we discussed from the BUS800 textbook.

In your presentation, briefly introduce the textbook topic(s) or

concept(s) that you have chosen, identify your source, and then relate
your findings to course material clearly, concisely, with energy and
enthusiasm. In your concluding remarks, state what you believe to be
the key takeaways or implications of your selection as they relate to
BUS80

https://hbr.org/2020/02/lessons-from-teslas-approach-to-innovation

Hi, I’m going to be presenting on the differentiation advantage

which is on pages 81 to 85 of the textbook.

The Article I choose to analyze is from Harvard Business Review

called “Lessons from Tesla’s Approach to Innovation”, which is an
article written by Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer in February of 2020.
The article discusses Tesla’s planning for the future which
allowed them to gain success in the electric car market.

The current strategy that tesla has incorporated would be a

differentiation strategy, they have incurred a lot of capital
expenses so that they can build more charging stations like EVgo
across the country, which has allowed Telsa to be rated as one of
the only electric vehicles that are suitable for long-distance.
Therefore, the convenience of tesla is superior to that of its
competitors.

Tesla also holds a high brand image, while its history pales in
comparison to its competitors like General Motor, Ford, and
Chrysler. Tesla or Elon Musk has built a huge following through
social media and advertisements to allure customers to their
brand. As currently many people consider Tesla as a luxury brand
as its infrastructure is geared towards its technology features, as
such many people feel prestige branding with Tesla.

likewise, high investments in R&D have also allowed Tesla to

build more sustainable batteries and better software than other
vehicles. As quoted in the article “ historically we have been great
mechanical engineers, but now we need to become better
software engineers. Tesla has more software than an average
vehicle, as such, it is quite hard to imitate Tesla’s software
components.

To summarize this article, Tesla’s strategy was led by two primary

pillars, one would be winning the support of its followers and the
second is planning steps ahead of its competitors. In BUS 800 we
learned about strategy and tactics in our first class. Using a chess
analogy, a strategy would be positioning your pieces in a specific
arrangement to get to where you want to be and tactics could be
demonstrated as the act of moving the said pieces into those
positions. Here Telsa’s goal was to enter the high-end market, to
do that they needed to incorporate an innovation strategy that
focused on transforming the automotive industry. Their strategy
was the word of mouth advertising and referrals to gain large
followings. The tactic was incurring capital expenses to build a
market for rechargeable vehicles. This worked because they built
enough infrastructure in place for charging vehicles such that new
customers would be more likely to go get a Telsa as it had many
charging stations, this is also because the Tesla EV charging
stations do not accommodate other electric vehicles.