Archive for 13 August 2008
Robust Competitive Advantage
| Peter Klein |
Rich Makadok, during an AoM session on “Real Options and Competitive Advantage,” made an interesting point about the concept of sustained competitive advantage (SCA). The modifier sustained is typically taken to mean “persisting over a long period of time.” As Rich noted, however, the initial formulation of SCA in Barney (1991) doesn’t include a temporal dimension at all. It refers, instead, to imitability: “a firm is said to have a sustained competitive advantage when it is implementing a value creating strategy not simultaneously being implemented by any current or potential competitors and when these other firms are unable to duplicate the benefits of this strategy” (Barney, 1991, p. 102). Sustained competitive advantage, in other words, refers to value-creating activities that cannot be imitated. The key is entry barriers, not time.
Rich suggested replacing SCA with some other term, like “hard-to-duplicate competitive advantage,” for greater clarity. Here’s my suggestion: robust competitive advantage. What do you think?
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