Guest Lecture on Barriers to Market Entry & Competitive Landscape Faced by Entrepreneurs

On 21.08.2023 Guest Lecture on "Barriers to Market Entry & Competitive Landscape faced by Entrepreneurs" was organized by the Entrepreneurship Development Cell of Management Studies department and IIC. The session was handled by Mrs.M,Thanalakshmi, Assistant Professor, Department of Management Studies, Francis Xavier Engineering College, Vannarpettai from 09.30 AM- 12.30 PM. 42 students and one faculty participated in the program.

The program started with the welcome address by Dr.V.M.Sangeetha, EDC coordinator of Management Studies, Francis Xavier Engineering College. In her welcome address, she listed the activities conducted by the EDC in association with IIC for motivating students to emerge as entrepreneurs. The resource person started her session by highlighting the entrepreneurial opportunities for the MBA students and encouraged the students to make use of those opportunities. She continued her presentation relating to the common barriers to entry in the market for entrepreneurs such as economics of scale, product differentiation, capital requirements, and switching costs, access to distribution channels, cost disadvantages independent of scale, Government policy. For each category she illustrated with real time examples.

She continued her session with the challenges of Indian entrepreneurs in the recent days. She asked the students to answer the questions that the real challenges for Indian entrepreneurs as on today. Students gave some interesting answers like competition of established brands, employee turnover, and resource acquisition and so on. She appreciated students for the answers and started giving few Indian recent case studies to explain the entrepreneurial challenges and strategies used to avoid those challenges. The resource person presented the fundamentals of competitive landscape. With interesting visualization effect, she explained how competitive landscape was done in the business market.

She also added frameworks of competitive landscape analysis such as SWOT Analysis, Strategic group analysis, BCG matrix, perceptual mapping and porter’s five forces model. Students were given with perceptual mapping activity for any company. Students were divided into teams and each team were asked to choose one brand and asked the team to do competitive analysis of their chosen brand with their competitive brand. Students were excited and each team came out with interesting competitive analysis. Finally, the resource person concluded the session by appreciating students for their active involvement an interest towards the session. The programme was ended with students’ feedback and Vote of thanks.