This course equips the DBA participants with the theoretical and analytical tools required to understand how organizations create and sustain competitive advantage in environments characterized by technological disruption, digital transformation, and systemic tensions including social, environmental, political, international and technological challenges that increase uncertainty.
Grounded in the Dynamic Capabilities framework (Teece, Pisano & Shuen, 1997; Teece, 2007), the course mobilizes the sensing–seizing–reconfiguring triad as its organizing architecture across four sessions of three hours each.
Session 1 establishes the theoretical foundations of dynamic capabilities, contrasting them with the Resource-Based View and examining how firms detect and interpret weak signals from their competitive environment.
Session 2 explores the strategic dimensions of innovation - from disruptive trajectories (Christensen) to value innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim & Mauborgne) - with a focus on business model renewal as a seizing mechanism.
Session 3 addresses organizational ambidexterity and strategic agility as reconfiguring capabilities, examining how firms simultaneously exploit current assets and explore emerging opportunities.
Session 4 broadens the analytical lens toward corporate governance, stakeholder theory, and planetary boundaries, interrogating how governance architectures condition - and are conditioned by - the firm's capacity for sustainable transformation.
Compulsory readings and in class case discussion are used to build over a collective creation of knowledge.