Swot Analysis of "Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis" written by David Chambers, Elroy Dimson, Luis M. Viceira includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Clare College facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, and Finance & Accounting.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis casestudy better are - – central banks are concerned over increasing inflation, customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, wage bills are increasing, technology disruption, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, increasing energy prices, increasing commodity prices,
increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, there is increasing trade war between United States & China, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Clare College, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Clare College operates in.
According to Harvard Business Review, 75% of the managers use SWOT analysis for various purposes such as – evaluating current scenario, strategic planning, new venture feasibility, personal growth goals, new market entry, Go To market strategies, portfolio management and strategic trade-off assessment, organizational restructuring, etc.
SWOT Objectives / Importance of SWOT Analysis and SWOT Matrix
SWOT analysis of Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Clare College
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Finance & Accounting field.
4. Making a Finance & Accounting topic specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Clare College
Strengths Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Clare College in Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis Harvard Business Review case study are -
Highly skilled collaborators
– Clare College has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive segment. Secondly the value chain collaborators of the firm in Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis HBR case study have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Clare College has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in, as mentioned in case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis - staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Training and development
– Clare College has one of the best training and development program in the industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis Harvard Business Review case study by analyzing – employees retention, in-house promotion, loyalty, new venture initiation, lack of conflict, and high level of both employees and customer engagement.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Clare College in the segment is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Clare College has built up over years in its products and services combo offer has resulted in high retention of customers, lower marketing costs, and greater ability of the firm to focus on its customers.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Clare College is one of the leading recruiters in the industry. Managers in the Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis are in a position to attract the best talent available. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Learning organization
- Clare College is a learning organization. It has inculcated three key characters of learning organization in its processes and operations – exploration, creativity, and expansiveness. The work place at Clare College is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders in Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis Harvard Business Review case study emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Clare College in the sector have low bargaining power. Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Clare College to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Digital Transformation in Finance & Accounting segment
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Clare College digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Clare College has successfully integrated the four key components of digital transformation – digital integration in processes, digital integration in marketing and customer relationship management, digital integration into the value chain, and using technology to explore new products and market opportunities.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Clare College are driving operational speed, building greater agility, and keeping the organization nimble to compete with new competitors. It helps are organization to ideate new ideas, and execute them swiftly in the marketplace.
Strong track record of project management
– Clare College is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Ability to lead change in Finance & Accounting field
– Clare College is one of the leading players in its industry. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in its segment but also across the whole industry. The ability to lead change has enabled Clare College in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Weaknesses Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis are -
Slow to harness new channels of communication
– Even though competitors are using new communication channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, and Snap, Clare College is slow explore the new channels of communication. These new channels of communication mentioned in marketing section of case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis can help to provide better information regarding products and services. It can also build an online community to further reach out to potential customers.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Clare College has not been able to do capital spending to the tune of the competition. This has resulted into fewer innovations and company facing stiff competition from both existing competitors and new entrants who are disrupting the industry using digital technology.
High bargaining power of channel partners
– Because of the regulatory requirements, David Chambers, Elroy Dimson, Luis M. Viceira suggests that, Clare College is facing high bargaining power of the channel partners. So far it has not able to streamline the operations to reduce the bargaining power of the value chain partners in the industry.
Employees’ incomplete understanding of strategy
– From the instances in the HBR case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis, it seems that the employees of Clare College don’t have comprehensive understanding of the firm’s strategy. This is reflected in number of promotional campaigns over the last few years that had mixed messaging and competing priorities. Some of the strategic activities and services promoted in the promotional campaigns were not consistent with the organization’s strategy.
No frontier risks strategy
– After analyzing the HBR case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis, it seems that company is thinking about the frontier risks that can impact Finance & Accounting strategy. But it has very little resources allocation to manage the risks emerging from events such as natural disasters, climate change, melting of permafrost, tacking the rise of artificial intelligence, opportunities and threats emerging from commercialization of space etc.
Interest costs
– Compare to the competition, Clare College has borrowed money from the capital market at higher rates. It needs to restructure the interest payment and costs so that it can compete better and improve profitability.
Lack of clear differentiation of Clare College products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Clare College needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative, highlighted in the case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis, in the dynamic environment Clare College has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Clare College has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
Skills based hiring
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Clare College has created an environment where the organization is dominated by functional specialists rather than management generalist. This has resulted into product oriented approach rather than marketing oriented approach or consumers oriented approach.
Need for greater diversity
– Clare College has taken concrete steps on diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the efforts so far has resulted in limited success. It needs to expand the recruitment and selection process to hire more people from the minorities and underprivileged background.
Aligning sales with marketing
– It come across in the case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis that the firm needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department in the case Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Clare College is planning to shift buying processes online.
Opportunities Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities highlighted in the Harvard Business Review case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis are -
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Clare College can build a diversified supply chain model across various countries in - South East Asia, India, and other parts of the world. This reconfiguration of global supply chain can help, as suggested in case study, Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis, to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Clare College has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in the sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled, as illustrated in the Harvard case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis - to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Clare College to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Buying journey improvements
– Clare College can improve the customer journey of consumers in the industry by using analytics and artificial intelligence. Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis suggest that firm can provide automated chats to help consumers solve their own problems, provide online suggestions to get maximum out of the products and services, and help consumers to build a community where they can interact with each other to develop new features and uses.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Clare College to expand its talent hiring zone. According to McKinsey Global Institute, 20% of the high end workforce in fields such as finance, information technology, can continously work from remote local post Covid-19. This presents a really great opportunity for Clare College to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Clare College can leverage digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the production process, customer analytics to get better insights into consumer behavior, realtime digital dashboards to get better sales tracking, logistics and transportation, product tracking, etc.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Clare College has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in the industry. This can help Clare College to build a more holistic ecosystem as suggested in the Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis case study. Clare College can build new products and services such as - data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Reconfiguring business model
– The expansion of digital payment system, the bringing down of international transactions costs using Bitcoin and other blockchain based currencies, etc can help Clare College to reconfigure its entire business model. For example it can used blockchain based technologies to reduce piracy of its products in the big markets such as China. Secondly it can use the popularity of e-commerce in various developing markets to build a Direct to Customer business model rather than the current Channel Heavy distribution network.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in Finance & Accounting industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Clare College can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Clare College in the consumer business. Now Clare College can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Clare College to conduct training and development for its employees across the world. This will result in not only reducing the cost of training but also help employees in different part of the world to integrate with the headquarter work culture, ethos, and standards.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Clare College can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Clare College operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Finance & Accounting sector.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Clare College can still utilize the low interest rates to borrow money for capital investment. Secondly it can also use the increase of government spending in infrastructure projects to get new business.
Manufacturing automation
– Clare College can use the latest technology developments to improve its manufacturing and designing process in Finance & Accounting segment. It can use CAD and 3D printing to build a quick prototype and pilot testing products. It can leverage automation using machine learning and artificial intelligence to do faster production at lowers costs, and it can leverage the growth in satellite and tracking technologies to improve inventory management, transportation, and shipping.
Threats Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis are -
High level of anxiety and lack of motivation
– the Great Resignation in United States is the sign of broader dissatisfaction among the workforce in United States. Clare College needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Finance & Accounting industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
Environmental challenges
– Clare College needs to have a robust strategy against the disruptions arising from climate change and energy requirements. EU has identified it as key priority area and spending 30% of its 880 billion Euros European post Covid-19 recovery funds on green technology. Clare College can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Finance & Accounting industry.
Increasing wage structure of Clare College
– Post Covid-19 there is a sharp increase in the wages especially in the jobs that require interaction with people. The increasing wages can put downward pressure on the margins of Clare College.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Clare College has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Finance & Accounting industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Clare College needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Finance & Accounting sector. According to Mckinsey study top managers believe that the adoption of technology in operations, communications is 20-25 times faster than what they planned in the beginning of 2019.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry in the industry are lowering. It can presents Clare College with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Clare College can face downward pressure on margins from increasing competition from international players. The international players have stable revenue in their home market and can use those resources to penetrate prominent markets illustrated in HBR case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis .
Capital market disruption
– During the Covid-19, Dow Jones has touched record high. The valuations of a number of companies are way beyond their existing business model potential. This can lead to capital market correction which can put a number of suppliers, collaborators, value chain partners in great financial difficulty. It will directly impact the business of Clare College.
Technology disruption because of hacks, piracy etc
– The colonial pipeline illustrated, how vulnerable modern organization are to international hackers, miscreants, and disruptors. The cyber security interruption, data leaks, etc can seriously jeopardize the future growth of the organization.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Finance & Accounting field will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Clare College can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Aging population
– As the populations of most advanced economies are aging, it will lead to high social security costs, higher savings among population, and lower demand for goods and services in the economy. The household savings in US, France, UK, Germany, and Japan are growing faster than predicted because of uncertainty caused by pandemic.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Clare College high dependence on third party suppliers can disrupt its processes and delivery mechanism. For example -the current troubles of car makers because of chip shortage is because the chip companies started producing chips for electronic companies rather than car manufacturers.
Instability in the European markets
– European Union markets are facing three big challenges post Covid – expanded balance sheets, Brexit related business disruption, and aggressive Russia looking to distract the existing security mechanism. Clare College will face different problems in different parts of Europe. For example it will face inflationary pressures in UK, France, and Germany, balance sheet expansion and demand challenges in Southern European countries, and geopolitical instability in the Eastern Europe.
New competition
– After the dotcom bust of 2001, financial crisis of 2008-09, the business formation in US economy had declined. But in 2020 alone, there are more than 1.5 million new business applications in United States. This can lead to greater competition for Clare College in the Finance & Accounting sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers in the HBR case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis needs to zero down on the relative importance of each factor mentioned in the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants.
We can provide the relative importance to each factor by assigning relative weights. Weighted SWOT analysis process is a three stage process –
First stage for doing weighted SWOT analysis of the case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis is to rank the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. This will help you to assess the most important strengths and weaknesses of the firm and which one of the strengths and weaknesses mentioned in the initial lists are marginal and can be left out.
Second stage for conducting weighted SWOT analysis of the Harvard case study Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis is to give probabilities to the external strategic factors thus better understanding the opportunities and threats arising out of macro environment changes and developments.
Third stage of constructing weighted SWOT analysis of Clare College: Seeking Investment Opportunity in a Financial Crisis is to provide strategic recommendations includes – joining likelihood of external strategic factors such as opportunities and threats to the internal strategic factors – strengths and weaknesses. You should start with external factors as they will provide the direction of the overall industry. Secondly by joining probabilities with internal strategic factors can help the company not only strategic fit but also the most probably strategic trade-off that Clare College needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.