A review of empirical research on dynamic competitive strategy, страница 10

Third, researchers have built on the fact that resources and capabilities are often accumulated through collective trial and error, or arise through idiosyncratic situations and circumstances (Mauri and Michaels 1998). Consequently, the stock of resources at any given point in time can either limit or expand the strategic options of a firm relative to its competitors, and so represents a powerful source of sustained heterogeneity among firms (Lee 2003).

Finally, resources and capabilities exert effects beyond the boundaries of the firm. Differences between the resource bases of competitors determine the intensity and timing of competitive moves. This is exemplified by Young et al. (2000), who suggest that the frequency and speed of competitive moves among multimarket rivals increases with increasing resource dissimilarity.

Competitive Strategy→Environmental Contingencies

Researchers increasingly recognize that strategic actions are not only a response to changes in environmental and organizational contingencies, but that they also influence the path by which several of these contingencies evolve, thereby creating a dynamic framework of interactions as well as setting the stage for the next iteration of competitive activity.

Competitive strategy→Technological environment. We see studies of the technological environment as an outcome of strategic actions falling into a second subgroup. While there are many studies that focus on innovation outcomes, we have found only four that focus on how competitive strategy shapes the technological environment as a setting for subsequent strategic actions.

The results of these studies suggest that the competitive strategies of firms within an industry shape the evolution of competitive technological positions (Stuart and Podolny 1996), as well as the evolution of a dominant technological design (Suarez and Utterback 1995). However, path dependencies exert a strong influence on this development, as firms are often stymied in the creation of breakthrough inventions because familiar technology paths and local search patterns are so dominant (Ahuja and Lampert 2001; Stuart and Podolny 1996). The effect is particularly strong in incumbent firms which have a long history of exposure to existing technologies and consequently tend to sustain familiar technological development paths, and less pronounced in the case of new entrants, who tend to lead in disruptive technologies (Christensen and Bower 1996). Firms can stem negative tendencies in this area by changing their innovation strategies, consciously favoring experimentation with novel, pioneering and emerging technologies (Ahuja and Lampert 2001). This makes the competitive strategy→technological environment link another link that accounts for path dependencies. However, important characteristics such as the timing of strategic actions, as well as the long-term pace of strategic adaptation, still seem to offer potential with respect to their influence on the evolution of the technological environment.

Competitive strategy→Competitor actions and competitive landscape. Of the two relevant outcome variables, longitudinal research in this linkage has mostly focused on the link between competitive action and competitive response. Findings suggest that the likelihood and number of competitive responses increase with the external orientation of rivals, the visibility of a competitive move, and the centrality of the market under attack. However, the likelihood of a response decreases with the structural complexity and general difficulty of responding (Smith et al. 1991). The studies that also investigated the timing of competitive responses found that the external orientation of competitors was an important explanatory variable in predicting response speed (Smith et al. 1991). The number of actions carried out by rivals, the structural complexity of a preceding action, the effort required to retaliate and the strength of impact on the key markets of competitors were all found to decrease the response speed of a firm's competitors (Chen et al. 1992; Chen and Miller 1994; Smith et al. 1991). However, we found no study in the literature covered by this review on competitive actions and response that focused specifically on how a history of competitive interactions might potentially shape subsequent competitive rivalry.