What is the profit potential of a firm, and how can we assess whether a firm is reaching its potential?
This course is designed to equip students with essential managerial decision-making skills to address these core questions. Throughout the course, we will explore why the competitive environment is crucial for assessing the profit potential of both industries and individual firms. To this end, we examine methods for measuring and evaluating firm profitability using a combination of strategic, costing, and pricing analyses.
After building a strong theory foundation, we will invite real companies to present real-life cases. For example, for this year's group assignment, we are collaborating with Fløibanen AS to analyze a real-world profitability case. A select number of groups will have the opportunity to present their findings at the top of Mount Fløyen. As the content of this course is highly applicable to practice, we focus on bridging the theory-practice gap by collaborating with firms from different industries.
Although our focus is on profitability, we take sustainability considerations seriously in this course. We integrate ethics and sustainability into all aspects of our strategic profitability analyses and explore to what extent firms can "do well while doing good." By working on practical applications of profitability analysis, this course provides students with the opportunity to better understand the impact of ethical and sustainability considerations on managerial decision-making.