Competitive strategy

Price wars are a fact of life, whether we're talking about the fast-paced world of knowledge products, the marketing of Internet appliances, or the staid,...

Today's dynamic markets and technologies have called into question the sustainability of competitive advantage. Under pressure to improve productivity,...

For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which...

Despite a long-term decline in the circus industry, Cirque du Soleil profitably increased revenue twenty-two-fold over the last 10 years by reinventing...

Most executives believe that competing through business models is critical for success, but few have come to grips with how best to do so. One common...

In 1979, a young associate professor at Harvard Business School published his first article for HBR, "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy." In the years...

A four-phase model of multinational corporate planning proves useful for evaluating and improving corporate planning systems. Advances in explicit formulation...

An interview with the former head of British Cycling.

The capitalist system is under siege. Recently business has been criticized as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies...

Why is it so hard to build and maintain the capacity to innovate? The reason is not simply a failure to execute but a failure to articulate an innovation...

Although the ability to manage torrents of data has become crucial to companies' success, most organizations remain badly behind the curve. More than...

First answer two questions; then explore four paths.

Companies may want to shift a brand's position--to exploit less crowded territory, for example, or grow sales. Companies have long used perceptual mapping...

A four-year, ten-nation study of the patterns of competitive success in leading countries concludes that companies achieve competitive advantage through...

Traditional approaches to strategy assume that the world is relatively stable and predictable. But globalization, new technologies, and greater transparency...

With the help of technology, companies today sweep up huge amounts of customer data. But they tend to be opaque about the information they collect and...

Many factors determine the nature of competition, including not only rivals, but also the economics of particular industries, new entrants, the bargaining...

Here's how to build one.

People throughout your organization are energetically pursuing the new. But does all that activity add up to a strategy?

Scale now trumps differentiation.