Strategic Management Journal. Antecedents of temporary advantage, страница 10

Consider the economics and finance literatures, which have not been limited by assumptions of sustainability. These fields published several papers reporting that performance volatility was increasing in several aspects of the economy. The macroeconomics literature reported rising volatility in earnings, sales, employment growth, capital expenditures, and total factor productivity (Comin and Mulani, 2006; Comin and Philippon, 2006). And the finance literature reported an increase in volatility of abnormal returns for U.S. equity returns (Campbell et al., 2001; Irvine and Pontiff, 2009.)

The roots of temporary advantages take hold in the strategy field

Despite the slowness of the strategy field to recognize the rise of temporary competitive advantages (based on performance volatility), some strategy scholars have taken early note of the changing and temporary nature of competition (Bettis and Hitt, 1995). Other scholars have worked to identify the underlying assumptions distinguishing paradigms based on sustainable competitive advantage (RBV, industrial organization) versus temporary competitive advantage (such as hypercompetition), see Lengnick-Hall and Wolff (1999).

In addition, principles of how a firm can deal with rapidly eroding advantages are beginning to emerge in the literature. For example, it is suggested that firms should engage in self-cannibalization, preemption of the market by being first to introduce the next new advantage, time pacing, and the use of unpredictable, aggressive actions (MacMillan, 1988; D'Aveni, 1994; Nault and Vandenbosch, 1996; Brown and Eisenhardt, 1998). In addition, we are also beginning to see evidence that firms should attend to limiting or improving their weakness (learning), destroying the core competencies or center of gravity of industry leaders, and leveraging one's core competency into only a few markets to avoid getting spread too thin and to conserve capital for investment in weaknesses and the next temporary competitive advantage. To avoid wasting resources, the literature also suggests the use other people's money (through alliances, joint ventures, licensing, etc.) when leveraging your competencies into more distant markets (D'Aveni, 1994; Hamel, 2000; see also the Special Issue on Hypercompetition in Organization Science, Ilinitch, D'Aveni, and Lewin, 1996).

In sum, it appears that the strategy field has been slow to accept the notion that environments are increasingly made up of temporary advantages, especially when they highlight the declining importance of sustainable advantages derived from the RBV or industrial organization economics-based perspective of strategy. Nevertheless, the field has made much more progress than we initially expected and is now ripe for development of a new major paradigm based on temporary advantage that would compete with or complement the two other paradigms based on sustainable advantage.

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE'S UNIQUE CONTRIBUTIONS TO TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE

1.Top of page

2.Abstract

3.Antecedents of temporary advantage

4.The management of temporary advantage

5.Consequences of temporary advantage

6.The field of strategic management without sustainable advantage

7.SUMMARY OF EXTANT WORK ON TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE

8.THIS SPECIAL ISSUE'S UNIQUE CONTRIBUTIONS TO TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE

9.THE FUTURE OF TEMPORARY VERSUS SUSTAINABLE ADVANTAGE: MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE OR SIMULTANEOUSLY COEXISTENT?

10.REFERENCES

This special issue contains a number of articles that contribute significantly to theory and evidence of temporary advantage. Table 2 displays the different approaches taken by these papers. One paper is not shown in Table 2 because it spanned the three rows: actions, resources, and performance (i.e., Navigating in a hypercompetitive environment: the roles of action aggressiveness and TMT integration by Chen et al., 2010).