The last day of the business course will be completely focussed on experiencing the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial spirit. Several visits to Silicon Valley companies will offer a unique view behind the scenes of one of the most vibrating and innovative business environments in the world.

During the visits we will have intimate strategic discussions with real Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. We will visit start-ups as well as established pure-players to get a feel for what doing business in the Valley is all about.

A selection of visits from the 2011 business course includes:

Google Headquarters – Mountainview Campus:
Campus tour including a furure vision and Q&A session with the Google Industry Director for Retail.

Cool Iris - Liveshare:
An intimate discussion with one of the founders of this industry challenger on entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and the constant search for balancing propositions and the right business model for a challenger application: Liveshare.

More Business Course topics:

- The Origins of Disruption
- Dealing with Infinite Touchpoints
- When Consumers Talk to Eachother
- The Platform Battle: Mobile Internet & Apps
- Exploring the Valley

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Mobile First! This strategic choice of internet powerhouse Google illustrates the fundamental shift in thinking about internet communication as a consequence of the rise of mobile internet. Together with developments in cloud computing this is probably the most fundamental disruptive technological development of the decade.

Sessions on this topic aim to explore new business models enabled by mobile internet technology as wel as the implications of the current battle for mobile platform dominace between the three key players: Apple OS, Android and Windows.

A selection of sessions on this topics from the 2011 business course includes:

Android Crashes the iPhone Party:  The Battle of Mobile Platforms
Android has emerged as a big challenger to Apple’s iphone – crashing the iPhone party – and rapidly extending to the tablet market as well as emerging as a shopping channel. This session analyzes the case of Andriod versus iPhone as an example of platform competition.

The future of the mobile payment market
This sessions offers real live insights into mobile payments strategy of one of the worlds leading mobile payment providers: PayPal. During the session, we will discuss developments and trends in de mobile payments market, and how they affect your business.

More Business Course topics:

- The Origins of Disruption
- Dealing with Infinite Touchpoints
- When Consumers Talk to Eachother
- The Platform Battle: Mobile Internet & Apps
- Exploring the Valley

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“Social media are word-of-mouth on steriods”, said Gary Vaynerchuck in 2008. And they have proven to be just that, and more! Although most organization are aware of the simple fact they should embrace social media, only few actualy do. And many of those who do experience  that embracing social media requires structured social strategy development as well as flawless execution throughout the organisation.

This topic focusses on the succesful use of social media for your organisation, with special attention to social media analytics.

A selection of sessions on this topic from the 2011 business course includes:

Sentiment Analysis and Sentiment Analytics
Online sentiments from blogs, reviews and ratings are available on an increasing scale. This session explores the use of online sentiments, illustrated by on of the world’s leading compnaies in this flied: Power Reviews.

Groupon and Groupon Imitators: Flash in the Pan or Here to Stay?
The unprecedented global growth of Groupon offers insights in the development of the so called ‘social promotion’ initiatives. Since the birth of groupon in 2009, a variety of new start-ups has developed businesmoddels that try to imitate and capitalize or even improve upon the Groupon model.

This session explores the possibilities and limitations of these socially driven, ‘deal-of-the-day’ models enabled by Web 2.0 technology, as well as their potential future direction.

Facebook: Platforms and Fan Pages
This session focusses on the growth of the various Facebook platforms, their business value, as well as emerging facebook marketing strategies.

More Business Course topics:

- The Origins of Disruption
- Dealing with Infinite Touchpoints
- When Consumers Talk to Eachother
- The Platform Battle: Mobile Internet & Apps
- Exploring the Valley

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From a world with limited and fairly isolated customer contact channels in the ‘pre-digital’ age, we have quickly evolved to the digital and mobile age in which the amount of customer contact channels in theory is infinite. In this new age, it is not enough to simly replicate your activities across different channels to manage cross channel customer behaviour effectively and efficiently.

The management of a large amount of customer contact channels requires a systematic approach that capitalises on each channel’s strenght, while at the same time making optimal use of existing resources. It requires using different analytics and selecting the right KPI’s to measure ROI.

The sessions on this topic discuss how brands and organizations can cope with this new reality, its opportunities and its consequences for channel strategy development and management practice.

A selection of sessions on this topic fron the 2011 business course includes:

The battle for future retailing: Amazon, the new Wallmart of the web:
This session highlights the nature of the competition between pure play and multi-channel retailers using a financial comparison case of Wal-Mart and Amazon.com, as illustration of the impact of the new retail paradigm.

The HP brand challenge: Should HP go direct?
Organizations are confronted with customers who voice their opinion on, and do business over the internet. Your brand is  discussed on the net and brand communities are growing. Paralel to these developments the possibilities for brands to reach their end customers as well as sell to them directly are growing too.

The challenge for brand manufacturers seems thus to be concentrated on questions like: how to manage my brand online? Should my brand go direct? Choices that not only require a completely new perspective on brand management, but also force orgnisations to rethink their channel stratey to cope with conflicts in with conventional channel partners.

More Business Course topics:

- The Origins of Disruption
- Dealing with Infinite Touchpoints
- When Consumers Talk to Eachother
- The Platform Battle: Mobile Internet & Apps
- Exploring the Valley

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This topic focusses on the fundamental drivers behind the disruptive nature of internet technology. Why and how are current business paradigms constanly being challenged? What are the characteristics of winner-takes-all markets? Which players are prone to be affected most and why?

During the sessions we will constanly compare new models to existing ones, identifying the factors causing disruption, as well as accompanying opportunities for innovation. Together we will discuss how these developments affect your business now, and in the future.

A selection of sessions on this topic from the 2011 business course includes:

Disruption & digitization of traditional advertising models: The Monster case:
The Monster.com case provides an excellent view into the classified advertising market in the early state of Digital Disruption.

Drivers of disruption: the 3 Internet GTP’s:
In this session, the Internet is decontructed using its three general purpose technologies (GTP’s) as a framework: Digitization, Networking and Interactivity (DNI). During the session the business value of these characteristics will be explored.

More Business Course topics:

- The Origins of Disruption
- Dealing with Infinite Touchpoints
- When Consumers Talk to Eachother
- The Platform Battle: Mobile Internet & Apps
- Exploring the Valley

costs <> content <> testimonials <> date & location <> contact <> register