Open Access
Competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance
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Porter's 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 as discussed by the authors, has become an essential part of international business thinking, taking strategy from broad vision to an internally consistent configuration of activities.Abstract:
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.read more
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References
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Archetypes of Strategy Formulation
Danny Miller,Peter H. Friesen +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors tried to understand the strategy making process by examining the organizational and environmental context in which it occurs by looking 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.