← Strategic response to external factors
Reading the notation
This standard grades on a small, fixed vocabulary — get these precise, since the schedules literally bracket their sample answers with these words.📖 Terms used in strategic response
9 termsCover the right column and check you can say what each one means.
- Strategic response
- A business-wide, long-term reaction decided at senior level that changes the direction of the business — not a single-department fix.
- Size
- The response commits significant resources, so it needs a decision at senior-management level.
- Scope
- The response reaches across multiple areas or departments of the business, not just one.
- Timeframe
- The response plays out, or its effects last, over an extended period rather than one season. At least TWO of size, scope, and timeframe must be named, in those words — this is the exact NZQA phrase and mark, every paper 2023–2025.
- External factor
- A force outside the business's control that it must respond to: economic, political/legal, social, technological, competitive, or environmental.
- Market share
- Your sales as a percentage of total market sales — it can fall even while your own sales rise, if the market grows faster.
- Economic sustainability
- The business's ability to keep operating profitably over the long term, without depleting the resources or margins it depends on.
- Opportunity / threat
- What an external factor could do for or to the business — always tied to a named measure, such as revenue, cost, or market share.
- Support agency
- An organisation such as NZTE, MFAT, or Callaghan Innovation that supplies market knowledge or contacts a business could not build alone.
How this vocabulary maps to the paper
- Size, scope and timeframe are needed in every (i) part.
- Market share and economic sustainability are the measures a positive or negative impact is usually tied to.
- Support-agency terms feed the operating-overseas parts.