Hi. A warm welcome to this course on strategy formulation. My name is Marcus Larsen, and I will be your instructor on this course. I work as a Professor in Strategy and International Management at the Department of Strategic Management and Globalization, at the Copenhagen Business School. First of all, thank you very much for joining this specialization. We are really excited to have you all on board. We definitely look forward to doing this move together with you all. The topic of this particular course is strategy formulation. And the idea here, is that I will go through different frameworks and concepts on how to formulate strategies. In particular over the next six weeks, we will dive into different aspects of strategy formulation. We'll start this module by talking more generally about strategy formulation. Second module will deal with industry analysis or specifically, how do you determine whether your industry is attractive or not. In the third module, we'll talk about resources and capabilities. In other words, what does your firm need in terms of formulating a good strategy. After this we'll talk about strategy formulation in more particular contexts, namely strategy in the multinational corporation. Now, seeing that most big firms out there today are multinational. It is therefore important to have an idea of how these organizations formulate their own strategies. And in the 5th module, will go into strategic decision making. Or more particularly, how strategies actually are formulated. For example, what do we assume about the people who are responsible for the strategies that we want to formulate and implement. So based on these five modules, you will in the sixth module be introduced to a graded assignment, where we will test the extent to which you have met the learning objectives, of this course successfully. And speaking of which, what is that we want you to learn by the end of this course? In this respect, we've formulated four specific learning objectives for this course. First of all, we want you to be able to identify why a strong strategy is essential for the future business success. Second, you should be able to formulate a business strategy that suits the needs and visions of your organization. Third, we want to explain why managers too often formulate suboptimal strategies. And, finally, we aim to enable you to extrapolate measures to optimize current business strategies. Taken together by completing this course, you should be able to present, analyze, and discuss different facets of business strategy formulation. And we certainly hope that you will succeed. Another little piece of information. Starting from the next module, I will introduce the content by talking about one particular case, which displays the content of that module. In this respect, it would be absolutely fantastic if you could also come up with other examples of firms or organizations, that face similar type of challenges or threat or opportunities. Because at the end of the day, the best learning will be achieved if you're able to relate whatever I'm gonna talk about to other, perhaps more interesting, more novel examples than the one I provide. Under all circumstances, I really, really look forward to doing this move together with you. And I certainly hope that you will find it interesting.