Organizing for innovation (original) (raw)

A CRITICAL ISSUE FACING companies today is how to create and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage within a turbulent and complex business environment, often in turmoil, facing an unpredictable and unstable future. Traditional ways of competing have reached a level of parity where businesses can no longer easily differentiate themselves solely on the basis of technology, product or price. These factors can often be readily acquired by competitors or new entrants and may, at best, create a temporary advantage. In order to enable firms to create sustainable competitive advantages, we have to look for new solutions. In the strategy literature there are two major paradigms for explaining sustainable competitive advantage, the industrial organization (IO) theory, which emphasizes barriers to competition and the resourcebased view, which suggests that firms are fundamentally idi0syncratic.l