Designing the Distinctive Offer — Reposition ELBS Against Institut Concorde

A four-round, advanced strategy simulation set inside École Lumière Business School (ELBS), a private AACSB-accredited business school in Montpellier, France (2,800 students, €62M revenue, a thin 8% operating margin, 140 faculty). On 5 June 2026 a far richer rival, Institut Concorde, announces a €20M 'Sustainable Business & AI' master with aggressive scholarships and a global campaign — aimed squarely at the high-potential segment ELBS hoped to grow. The board demands a credible repositioning plan within ten weeks. ELBS is stuck-in-the-middle: nine me-too programs differentiated on nothing, a Differentiation Index of just 42/100, and one genuinely valuable, rare and hard-to-imitate capability — a respected faculty specialism in sustainability and impact management with faculty depth for only one or two flagships. Playing the Dean with a fixed €6M strategic-investment budget, you (1) run a VRIN capability analysis to separate true sources of distinctiveness from commodity offerings and read where Concorde is strong and where it is not; (2) choose where to compete and what to STOP doing — concentrating the €6M on three or four programs to cross a differentiation threshold rather than peanut-buttering it across all nine; (3) design a defensible flagship built on owned capability rather than matching Concorde's discount, and decide whether to retain the lead sustainability professor Concorde is poaching; and (4) defend a viable, distinctive strategy to the board chair, reconciling differentiation with positive operating margin and a resilience stress-test. The scoring rewards genuine strategic-capability design and punishes the five classic errors — starting a spending war, peanut-butter allocation, over-extending the one capability until it is just a label, claiming a position ELBS cannot deliver, and a beautiful flagship that loses money. Final KPIs track the Differentiation Index, Segment-fit, Operating margin (€), and Competitive resilience against the €6M cap.