Toward Electric Cars and Clean Coal: A Comparative Analysis of Strategies and Strategy-Making in the U.S. and China

The Bass seminars at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business offer faculty and small groups of students the opportunity to interact in highly focused and intense ways on research topics of common interest. Our S373 Bass seminar Strategic Thinking in Action in Business and Beyond, has focused in the last several years on the energy situation facing the United States. The fall 2009 seminar focused on the development and adoption of the electric car and clean coal technologies in the U.S. and China. Together with the seminar participants we wanted to study the current strategies of both countries for dealing with these two issues, and we also wanted to study how they approach the strategy-making process. This research paper describes the results.