H
istorically, research on strategy has focused on how companies can identify and select attractive markets in which to compete. Over the past few decades, I have been on the vanguard of a fundamentally different approach that emphasizes the creation and exploitation of unique capabilities. With my collaborator David Teece of the University of California, Berkeley, I was instrumental in developing what is now referred to as the “dynamic capabilities” approach to strategy. This framework sees strategy as fundamentally a problem of selecting and building unique operating capabilities that lead to sustained advantage.
Books
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Operations, Strategy, and Technology
Operations, Strategy, and Technology” takes a fresh look at the foundations of corporate success, addressing the basic principles that guide the development of a powerful operations organization, and describing how a company's operating and technological resources can be applied to create a sustainable competitive advantage in today's "new" (global and IT-intensive) economy.
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Strategic Operations
Designed for the second-year elective opted by a third of the student body at the Harvard Business School, Hayes, Pisano and Upton break new ground in this text/casebook by emphasizing the manufacturing process itself as a competitive weapon. Today, companies typically adopt one or more of a growing number of improvement programs, such as TQM (Total Quality Management), JIT (Just-in-Time) production, and DFM (Design for Manufacturability). The majority of these improvement efforts, according to recent surveys, have not been successful. By pinning their hopes on a few best-practice approaches, managers implicitly abandon the central concept of a strategy in favor of a generic approach to competitive success. In clear, accessible prose, the authors propose a new explanation for the problems companies face by specifying the kind of competitive advantage each company is seeking in its marketplace and articulates how that advantage is to be achieved.
Articles
Case Studies
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Flying into the Future: Honda Aircraft Corporation
Harvard Business School Case no 618-012
This cases examine Honda’s diversification into the light jet market.