Has your firm participated in any mergers or acquisitions in the past three years?

1. Draw the vertical value chain for your firm’s industry. List the major firms in each important activity along the chain. Note that a firm’s name may appear multiple times in the value chain. This indicates some level of vertical integration by the firm. If your firm is in many different industries (e.g., GE), then choose the dominant industry or the one that intrigues you the most and use only that one for this analysis. 2. Is your firm highly vertically integrated? If yes, does it also employ taper integration? 3. Are any of the vertical value chain operations offshored? If so, list some of the pros and cons of having this part of the value chain outside the home country. 4. Use the preceding vertical value chain to identify the corporate strategy of the firm. In other words, where within the industry has the firm chosen to compete? Based on where it competes, describe what you now see as its corporate strategy. 5. Refer to the build-borrow-or-buy framework as a decision tree for your focal firm. Identify a strategic resource gap to study about the firm. Use the related questions to guide your thinking on the appropriate corporate strategy (build, borrow, or buy) to employ to close this gap and move the company forward. 6. Research what strategic alliances your firm has entered in the past three years. If there are several of these, choose the three you identify as the most important for further analysis. 7. Based on company press releases and business journal reports for each alliance, what do you find to be the main reason the firm entered these alliances? 8. Do you think each of the three alliances achieves the original intent and therefore is successful? Why or why not? 9. Does your firm have an identifiable alliance management organization? Can you find any evidence that this organization improves the likelihood of success for these alliances? What responsibilities does this alliance management organization have in your firm? 10. Has your firm participated in any mergers or acquisitions in the past three years? What was the nature of these actions? Did they result in a consolidation of competitors?