Academic literature on the topic 'Porter's generic strategies'

Abstract This chapter reflects on a neglected export sector in the Nigerian economy, that of tourism, in order to identify whether some refinements to the existing principles of developing tourism are merited. It then goes on to hint at both the issues that deserve consideration for future tourism development in Nigeria and also the general implications that the continued neglect of the sector portends. Strategic resource allocation, human resource development, funding of the tourism sector, and public-private sector roles are identified as the essential inputs to tourism development in general, highlighting their strategic importance with respect to policy and planning principles, as a framework for exploring the future growth and direction of the tourism sector in Nigeria in particular.

Competition is what keeps organizations and industries alive. Harvard Business School Professor, Michael Porter, was keen to understand the drivers of success in commercial organizations. His research indicated that industry structure mattered more than individual firm behaviour and his Five Forces model (1979) offers his explanation of the sources of competition at industry level. The model is based on the theory of determining the competitive intensity and attractiveness of a market. The five forces within the model include: competitive rivalry, threat of new entry, supplier power, buyer power, and threat of substitution. The model has been widely used by firms to analyse the external environment and specific external forces like competition, government policies, and social and cultural forces (Vining, 2011). Furthermore, to overcome such fierce competition created by the Five Forces model, and to ensure successful survival, Porter (1985) also introduced competitive strategies to gain a competitive advantage. By combining price and market type, Porter suggests these competitive strategies: cost leadership, differentiation, and market segmentation (or focus) to enable a competitive environment to prosper. This chapter concentrates on establishing and understanding the Five Forces model and the generic strategies.

Competitive strategies remain a central topic of research in strategic management. Recent conceptual developments and practices reveal possible additional types of competitive strategies due to the advances in information as well as manufacturing technologies. This paper proposes a conceptual extension of the generic strategies originally developed by Michael Porter (1980) to include additional competitive approaches as various combinations and extensions of the original four. Furthermore, this paper applies the extended model of competitive strategies to global strategic management to present a number of propositions. Contributions, limitations and future research are considered.

The intertwined relationship between competitive strategy (business level strategy) and entrepreneurship is critical in making strategy more potent and organisations more competitive. Different competitive strategies, namely Miles and Snow’s prospector, defender, analyser, and reactor strategies and Porter’s generic, low cost, differentiation, and focus strategies are analysed, clearly showing how these integrate with entrepreneurship. An integrated entrepreneurial competitive strategy is critical to the success of today’s organisation.

Innovation in the service/retail sector has not been fully examined in the non-Western literature. This preliminary work presents a study that was conducted in Shanghai, China. Three sets of the literature are consulted: Porter’s Generic Strategies Model, Hunt’s Resource Advantage Theory (R-A), and previous studies in the service and retail sectors. Findings developed from six selected successful Chinese supermarket companies have identified three types of innovation adopted by Chinese retailers: Technology based, non-technology based, and resource based innovation. The study takes a qualitative approach by using the methods of documentation survey and in-depth interviews with a panel of ten supermarket experts. Some managerial implications are explicated, and the limitations of the study and directions for future studies are discussed.

This chapter examines the ways in which the combined administrative and medical expertise informed the developing strategies of the Italian government during the early stages of the epidemic. While conforming to more general public health policies of Italian states, it also considers how far the Florentine experience of plague was mediated through existing local structures and the political status quo. The influence of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, remained very evident, as he sought to intervene in and to influence the developing policy of the magistrates of the health board, which was constituted by patricians who were members of his court. Meanwhile, the voluntary lay religious group, the Archconfraternity of the Misericordia, played a vital role in the transport and burial of the sick and the dead. While their porters and grave-diggers were paid, the members of the fraternity themselves performed their tasks from a sense of Christian charity towards the poorer members of society, a motivation which formed the obverse of the government's decrees against marginalised groups, such as prostitutes and Jews. A mixed motivation also informed the strategies of the medical staff in the service of the Sanità (health board), and the chapter looks at their role—sometimes distant, sometimes interventionist and sometimes compassionate—in inspecting the sick and recommending a wide range of treatments for the more affluent and the humble.

The study of industrial games of innovation is often associated with dominant theories representing various generic forms of organizational design and dynamics. The dominant theories in this area were traditionally Schumpeter’s destructive innovation, Porter’s five-force competitive analysis and Nalebuff’s value net. Other frameworks for analyzing industrial behavior include game theory and its derivative innovation games theory. For regulated high-technology industries, theoretical frameworks that do not account for interfirm coordination are often insufficient to understand or predict the industry behavior. Innovation in the aviation simulation and training industry will be presented in this paper as typical of the regulated high-technology industries. The aviation simulation and training industry emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and it was mostly demand-driven at its onset. The increase in the volume and importance of aviation resulted in government regulation of the industry in the late 1960’s. This has radically changed the industry’s game of innovation into a regulation-based coordination game. Literature described the regulation-centered innovation coordination as “an internally-coherent system of innovation.” The new game had the regulatory frameworks at the core of the innovation process as they defined the market’s acceptance and value capturing from innovative technologies. The evolution of these regulatory frameworks was almost entirely reactive to accidents and catastrophic failures that highlighted existing deficiencies in training methodologies or technologies. This ex-ante regulator-driven system of innovation exhibited recent evolutionary changes towards being a pedagogy-centered service-based system of innovation. The reason behind this transformation was a combination of endogenous and exogenous forces. Technological opportunities, economic pressures and strategic transformation by industry leaders were the three main categories of these forces. The resulting mode of innovation coordination in the industry was a service-oriented pedagogical platform, lead by supplier-user partnerships and monitored by regulation authorities. Compliance to equipment regulatory guidelines is not the principal means of value creation anymore. Rather, the pedagogic value of the training curriculum, encompassing the training devices, is the main source of value creation. A new stable equilibrium of innovation coordination is being reached by the industry, driven by its downstream-most service provision component.