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The Intelligence You'll Need
Need to Know Competitor's Core Competencies
The Situation:
In order to plan effectively for the future, you need to analyze the likely
future competitive landscape in your industry. This means examining existing
competitors,
developing scenarios relative to those competitors, and assigning probability
factors to those scenarios. First, however, you must understand what is
possible. That is, what are the core competencies of the competitors that
might enable
them to pursue new avenues of growth in the future.
Remember, core competence
is defined as a bundle of skill sets or capabilities that (1) makes a disproportionate
contribution to customer-perceived value, (2)
is competitively unique, and (3) might be applied in new product arenas in
the future.1
1 Competing for the Future,
1994, Harvard
Business
School Press, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad.
Intelligence You'll Need:
In which area do the competitor's competencies lie:
- quickly bringing a new product/service to market?
- generating capital for new ventures?
- exploitation of research and development?
- expertise in a particular process or technology?
- efficient order processing?
- sophisticated inventory management?
- mobilizing and training a remote sales force?
- motivating and training low-level hourly workers?
- flexible manufacturing?
- strong supplier management?
- logistics?
- something else?
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