The New Dynamics of Competition

by Michael D. Ryall

Photography: Courtesy of Pace Gallery

Artwork:Tara Donovan, Untitled (Mylar), 2011, Mylar and hot glue, Tara Donovan: Drawings (Pins), Pace Gallery, New York

In his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker made this observation about industries that rely on knowledge-based innovation: “For a long time, there is awareness of an innovation about to happen....Then suddenly there is a near-explosion, followed by a few short years of tremendous excitement, tremendous start-up activity, tremendous publicity....Later comes a ‘shakeout,’ which few survive.”

The problem, Drucker argues, is that knowledge-driven innovations are “almost never based on one factor but on the convergence of several different kinds of knowledge.” The initial breakthrough generates a spate of activity, but meaningful progress occurs only after all the pieces are in place.

I cannot attest to the scientific merit of Drucker’s claim, but I consider it to be a remarkably accurate description of the field of strategy. In its early days strategy was a loose affair. Content originated either from commonsense approaches such as SWOT analysis or from frameworks like the Boston Consulting Group’s growth-share matrix. In 1979, however, Michael Porter’s five forces model changed the field forever. It masterfully synthesized the practical implications of economic research on industrial organizations from the 1960s and 1970s. Knowledge-based innovation put strategy on the map as a field of study, virtually overnight. Competitive Strategy, Porter’s practitioner-oriented book, became an enormous success.

Porter’s ideas generated immediate excitement. They prompted interest from researchers in other fields and the establishment of the Strategic Management Society and the peer-reviewed Strategic Management Journal. A flurry of papers made informally reasoned claims about the causes of persistent performance differences across firms. Theories such as the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, and transaction-cost economics appeared, and an avalanche of empirical work quickly followed. Another seminal concept, though not as popular with practitioners as Porter’s proved to be, came in 1996, when Harvard Business School’s Adam Brandenburger and Harborne Stuart Jr. proposed “value-based business strategy.” That work has bred an extensive body of literature on strategy by mathematical economists.

From that backdrop, a general model of competitive strategy, which I call the value capture model (VCM), has emerged. It uniquely applies the mathematical concept of cooperative game theory to research on business strategy. (“Cooperative” is a misnomer, as the math focuses on competitive dynamics.) As such, the VCM has an explanatory, predictive potential that no other theory of competitive strategy, including Porter’s, can claim. The model is a work in progress, but scholars are starting to use it to explain the dynamics of competition and to identify practical implications for strategic decision making. At the VCM’s core is this axiom: “The value that any party can capture from engaging in transactions with a given set of parties is bounded by the value each of them can add to parties outside the set.”

In this article I will explain the axiom and its implications for how we need to think about strategy.
 
Redefining Competition: From Five Forces to One 
In most industries, a firm, its suppliers, and its customers all have choices about how and with whom they create value. To produce more value, they may change how they engage in transactions with existing suppliers and customers or may switch to other suppliers and customers. Those agents, in turn, have similar alternatives in how they transact with the original firm and with their own suppliers and customers.

That reality suggests a formal definition of competitiveness that applies equally to all the firms, suppliers, and customers in an industry: a tension between the value generated from transactions that a firm undertakes with a given set of agents and the forgone value it could have generated from transactions with other agents. That definition enables you to assign formal identities to the agents involved; to place them in a mathematical game-theory model; and, with given measures of competitive tension, to examine the payoffs from their investments in resources and capabilities. You can also bring big data—from enormous databases that track consumer behavior and spending, stock prices, company accounts, and so on—to bear on this work. No other current theory of strategy offers the ability to model the effect of strategic decisions so precisely or to use data to test hypotheses about what kinds of management processes or investments improve a given firm’s ability to capture value in its industry.