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Essay Instructions: Competitive Advantage Through Human Capital
For this component:

Identify best practices for human capital acquisition, development, and retention.
Analyze best practices that will enable human capital acquisition, development, and retention for your organization or industry.
Analyze current organization practices and their alignment with identified best practices.
Integrate the HRM and business best practices to propose how you will create or maintain a competitive advantage to meet the challenges of the future global environment of your industry.
Analyze the role of the HRM professional in integrating and implementing human capital acquisition, development, and retention best practices in your selected organization.
Provide a rationale for how your best practices and HRM professional's role enable human capital acquisition, development, and retention.
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Essay Instructions: You are renowned business guru and motivational speaker Mai Biz. You have been contracted by a prestigious national business organization to deliver a two part seminar on a couple of today?s hottest business topics: competitive advantage and international business.

Create a full 1,750- to 2,100-word transcript of your planned speech to meet the organization?s request.
Address the following questions for each topic:

Topic 1: Achieving Competitive Advantage

? How does the creation of value lead to competitive advantage?

? How may a firm achieve competitive advantage? Consider strategies of cost leadership, benefit leadership, and degrees of focus.

? How does the price elasticity of demand affect a firm?s strategic positioning for competitive advantage?

? What factors and strategies allow a firm to sustain competitive advantage? Cite at least one real life example of success and one real life example of failure in your explanation.

Topic 2: International Business

? What additional risks do multinational corporations face, and what additional opportunities do they enjoy when compared with domestic firms?

? What strategies may a multinational corporation use to best take advantage of the opportunities discussed above?

? What strategies may a multinational corporation use to best mitigate the risks discussed above?

? How does achieving competitive advantage at an international level differ from achieving competitive advantage at a domestic level? How may a firm strategically position itself for international competitive advantage? Cite at least one example or strategy specific to international business.

Essay Instructions: Zahra, S.A. (2005) ?A theory of international new ventures: A decade of research?, Journal of International Business Studies, 36 (1), January, pp. 20?28.
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/stable/info/3875288?seq=1


Explain how the article builds on the seminal work of Oviatt and McDougall in their paper, Toward a Theory of International New Ventures, published in 1994. Describe and analyse the factors identified in the Zahra article as giving competitive advantage to new firms in the globalised economy. Do you agree that these are the key factors underlying success in the international business environment? Give reasons for your answer.

If you wish to read the original article, it can be accessed through the University of Liverpool Library:

Oviatt, B.M. & McDougall, P.P. (1994) ?Toward a theory of international new ventures?, Journal of International Business Studies, 25 (1), pp. 45?64.
http://www.palgrave-journals.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/jibs/journal/v25/n1/abs/8490193a.html

Essay Instructions: Theoretical Critique in essay format.

Within a challenging economic environment the role of strategic human resource management is insignificant. Do approaches to strategic development and their links with strategic integration and the resource based theory have any impact as a potential source of competitive advantage?



- you must distinguish clearly between your own words and analysis and those of your sources.

Through completion of this assessment,
- provide a critical perspective of the literature on a topic
- construct a sustained argument in response to the question
-utilise and conform to the principles of academic rigour in the production of an acceptable, formal response to the question.