Integrating Course-Based Competitions into Strategic Management Instruction: A Reproducible Course Improvement Protocol

Strategic Management instruction requires students to apply analytical frameworks to uncertain, resource-constrained, and trade-off-based business situations. Course competitions can support this process when they are organized as a structured instructional system rather than as a single presentation activity. This article describes a reproducible protocol for integrating a three-stage course-based competition into an undergraduate Strategic Management course. The protocol follows a 16-week sequence that includes baseline assessment, core instruction, enterprise case introduction, team formation, strategic diagnosis, strategic decision simulation or decision-sheet completion, final strategy defense, post-course assessment, and course review. The instructional mechanism combines staged practice, enterprise case exposure, structured formative feedback, team accountability, oral defense, and rubric-based scoring. Locally operationalized process indicators are used to monitor classroom interaction, case-design completeness, feedback timeliness, task-rubric alignment, student engagement, and implementation fidelity. Student-level outcomes, team-level competition outcomes, rater agreement, missing-data patterns, artificial intelligence use disclosure, and score-inflation warning patterns are analyzed separately to avoid unit-of-analysis problems. Representative results, when reported, should be interpreted as context-specific implementation outputs from a retrospective, non-randomized educational-record comparison, not as evidence of causal effectiveness. The protocol provides an auditable procedure for designing, implementing, documenting, evaluating, and refining competition-integrated Strategic Management instruction within a course-improvement cycle.