COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into 'activities', or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage. Now an essential part of international business thinking, COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE takes strategy from broad vision to an internally consistent configuration of activities. Its powerful framework provides the tools to understand the drivers of cost and a company's relative cost position. Porter's value chain enables managers to isolate the underlying sources of buyer value that will command a premium price, and the reasons why one product or service substitutes for another. He shows how competitive advantage lies not only in activities themselves but in the way activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer activities. That the phrases 'competitive advantage' and 'sustainable competitive advantage' have become commonplace is testimony to the power of Porter's ideas. COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE has guided countless companies, business school students, and scholars in understanding the roots of competition. Porter's work captures the extraordinary complexity of competition in a way that makes strategy both concrete and actionable.

Competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance

The primary purpose of this article is to clarify the nature of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct and to propose a contingency framework for investigating the relationship between EO and firm performance. We first explore and refine the dimensions of EO and discuss the usefulness of viewing a firm's EO as a multidimensional construct. Then, drawing on examples from the EO-related contingencies literature, we suggest alternative models (moderating effects, mediating effects, independent effects, interaction effects) for testing the EO-performance relationship.

Clarifying the Entrepreneurial Orientation Construct and Linking It To Performance

This paper differs from previous examinations of organizational learning in that it is broader in scope and more evaluative of the literatures. Four constructs related to organizational learning knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory are articulated, and the literatures related to each are described and critiqued.

The literature on knowledge acquisition is voluminous and multi-faceted, and so the knowledge acquisition construct is portrayed here as consisting of five subconstructs or subprocesses: 1 drawing on knowledge available at the organization's birth, 2 learning from experience, 3 learning by observing other organizations, 4 grafting on to itself components that possess knowledge needed but not possessed by the organization, and 5 noticing or searching for information about the organization's environment and performance. Examination of the related literatures indicates that much has been learned about learning from experience, but also that there is a lack of cumulative work and a lack of integration of work from different research groups. Similarly, much has been learned about organizational search, but there is a lack of conceptual work, and there is a lack of both cumulative work and syntheses with which to create a more mature literature. Congenital learning, vicarious learning, and grafting are information acquisition subprocesses about which relatively little has been learned.

The literature concerning information distribution is rich and mature, but an aspect of information distribution that is central to an organization's benefitting from its learning, namely how units that possess information and units that need this information can find each other quickly and with a high likelihood, is unexplored. Information interpretation, as an organizational process, rather than an individual process, requires empirical work for further advancement. Organizational memory is much in need of systematic investigation, particularly by those whose special concerns are improving organizational learning and decision making.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2634941.pdf

Organizational Learning: The Contributing Processes and the Literatures

A meta-analysis of the relationships between organizational innovation and 13 of its potential determinants resulted in statistically significant associations for specialization, functional differe...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/256406.pdf

Organizational Innovation: A Meta-Analysis Of Effects Of Determinants and Moderators

This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate the effective strategic responses to environmental hostility among small manufacturing firms. Data on environmental hostility, organization structure, strategic posture, competitive tactics, and financial performance were collected from 161 small manufacturers. Findings indicate that performance among small firms in hostile environments was positively related to an organic structure, an entrepreneurial strategic posture, and a competitive profile characterized by a long-term orientation, high product prices, and a concern for predicting industry trends. In benign environments, on the other hand, performance was positively related to a mechanistic structure, a conservative strategic posture, and a competitive profile characterized by conservative financial management and a short-term financial orientation, an emphasis on product refinement, and a willingness to rely heavily on single customers.

Strategic management of small firms in hostile and benign environments

Summary Two very difJerent nmodels oJ pr-oduct innovation ar-e postulated and tested. The con rvative m-odel assumes that ininov-ation is peijormed reluictanitly-, mainl/ in r-esponise to serious challenges. It therefore pr-edic-ts that innoration will co rrelate positively with environmental, injformation processing, structlural and decision nmaking variables that represent, or help to recognize antd cope with these challenges. In conitrast, the entrepreneurial modlel supposes that innovation is alwavys aggressiv-ely plursued and w-vill be very high unless decision makers are warned to slow down. Thus negative correlations are predicted between innovation and the v-ariables that cant provide such warning. Co}rrelationial and curv ilinear regression anialyses revealed that each mi1odel wvas suppor ted by conservative and entrepreneurial sub-samples, respectively, in a diverse sanmple oj 52 Canadian firmns.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2485899.pdf

Innovation in Conservative and Entrepreneurial Firms: Two Models of Strategic Momentum

Whereas much is known about the relationships between strategy and structure, and between environment and structure, too little is known about a third link—the relationship between strategy-making and environment. An empirical study was conducted upon two distinct samples of firms. We hypothesized that increases in environmental dynamism, hostility and heterogeneity should be related to specific changes in the amount of analysis and innovation which characterizes strategy-making activity. Most of these relationships tended to be much stronger in successful than in unsuccessful samples of firms.

Strategy-making and environment: The third link

A review of recent literature on the corporate life cycle disclosed five common stages: birth, growth, maturity, revival, and decline. Theorists predicted that each stage would manifest integral complementarities among variables of environment "situation", strategy, structure and decision making methods; that organizational growth and increasing environmental complexity would cause each stage to exhibit certain significant differences from all other stages along these four classes of variables; and that organizations tend to move in a linear progression through the five stages, proceeding sequentially from birth to decline. These contentions were tested by this study. A sample of 161 periods of history from 36 firms were classified into the five life cycle stages using a few attributes deemed central to each. Analyses of variance were performed on 54 variables of strategy, structure, environment and decision making style. The results seemed to support the prevalence of complementarities among variables within each stage and the predicted inter-stage differences. They did not, however, show that organizations went through the stages in the same sequence.

A Longitudinal Study of the Corporate Life Cycle

There have been few attempts to understand the strategy making process by examining the organizational and environmental context in which it occurs Rather than adopting the stance of contingency theorists who focus mainly on bivariate relationships, we decided to look for simultaneous associations among a fairly large number of variables It was hoped that these variables would configure into models or archetypes which describe a series of different, though very frequently occurring modes or organizational failure and success The methodology used to isolate archetypes is explained Ten archetypes are described Successful archetypes are: the adaptive firm under moderate challenge, the adaptive firm in a very challenging environment, the dominant firm, the giant under fire, the entrepreneurial conglomerate, and the innovator Failure archetypes include: the impulsive firm, the stagnant bureaucracy, the headless giant, and the aftermath

Archetypes of Strategy Formulation

The change in 24 structural and strategy making variables over time is analyzed by a study of 26 companies. Organizations were found to resist reversals in the direction of change in strategy and s...

Peter H. Friesen

Papers

Innovation in Conservative and Entrepreneurial Firms: Two Models of Strategic Momentum

Strategy-making and environment: The third link

A Longitudinal Study of the Corporate Life Cycle

Archetypes of Strategy Formulation

Momentum and Revolution in Organizational Adaptation