Managing Research, Development, and Innovation: Managing the Unmanageable, Third Edition

16.5. STRATEGY AND INNOVATION

Our concepts of strategy are often derived from military and athletic contexts—sometimes ancient ones—and thus emphasize an organization's position in relation to enemies or competitors. Michael Porter's ubiquitous Five Forces framework, for example, views an organization's strategy in light of a set of external forces or threats, which includes not only rivals, but suppliers, substitutes, new entrants, and customers (Porter, 2008). And there's a reason Intel's co-founder Andy Grove titled his book Only the Paranoid Survive (1996). Overemphasis on competition, however, can result in defensive "me-too strategies," in which competitors simply attempt to one-up one another, and thus end up as followers rather than ...