Making the Theoretical Intuitive: An Anchored Approach to Teaching Porter’s Five Forces

Keywords: Porter’s five forces, industry analysis, strategy formulation, strategic management

Abstract: Porter’s five forces is a framework used in introductory management and upper- and graduate-level strategic management course to analyze an organization’s industry and its impacts on performance. While management educators have developed helpful tools to apply the framework, most start with theory and then move to application, which may bog down some students in theoretical distinctions rather than grasping the bigger lessons of industry analysis. This exercise flips that approach by starting with students’ experiences by working through a structured question set anchored to a familiar context, encouraging an intuitive grasp of the framework before presenting its specific theory.