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Summary of the article The Core Competence of the Corporation:

The Core Competence of the Corporation urged leaders to rethink the concept of the corporation itself from a portfolio of businesses managed and optimized independently, to a portfolio of competencies spanning across individual businesses and delivering real and sustaining competitive advantage. Nurturing core competencies requires thinking and operating differently When the organization is conceived of as a multiplicity of SBUs, no single business may feel responsible for maintaining a viable position in core products nor be able to justify the investment required to build world leadership in some core competence. In the absence of a more comprehensive view imposed by corporate management, SBU managers will tend to under invest.

The paper also provides a word of caution to those who are looking at the current economic environment as an ideal one in which to go acquisition shopping: leaders should evaluate and execute an acquisition for the purpose of building a core competence. Finally, it challenges the current push toward more decentralized businesses. The fragmentation of core competencies becomes inevitable when a diversified companys information systems, patterns of communication, career paths, managerial rewards, and processes of strategy development do not transcend SBU lines, the paper explained. Although there might be efficiency to be gleaned from decentralization, perhaps more credence should be given to their prediction that companies will be judged by their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible. Instead of fruitlessly trying to leverage core competencies into new businesses while protecting new ventures from corporate orthodoxies, Individual imagination must become corporate imagination. They outlined four elements which enable the corporate imagination:

1. Instead of viewing every new opportunity through the lens of existing businesses, managers must think outside of current boundaries and explore the white spaces which lie between existing businesses. This is where the core competency mindset helps. 2. Searching for innovative product concepts. Standard approaches to market analysis are not likely to yield ground breaking innovations. An understanding of needs and functionalities must replace the more conventional view of customers and products. Asking innocent questions (why does the product have to be this way?), understanding what the current product concept doesnt do for customers, and imagining how functionalities could be unbundled and re bundled

are just some of the means through which managers can escape the orthodoxy of conventional product concepts, the paper advises.

3. Overturning traditional price/performance assumptions. Thinking about price and performance in linear terms limits the potential for radical innovation. Instead of using existing product concepts as the starting point for new product development, managers might do well to challenge existing assumptions in the category about price/product trade-offs. 4. Getting out in front of customers. Simply being customer-led is not enough. Particularly in technology categories, customers often cant even imagine what is possible. Companies must lead customers where they want to go before they even know it themselves.

The expeditionary marketing part of the paper was about minimizing the risks of creating new markets and entering into new territory. Most companies approach their development efforts with a home-run mentality that is, trying to improve the odds of each hit, making big bets with big investments, and expecting huge success. They advise companies to place many small bets in quick succession in order to increase the likelihood that one will hit the jackpot. Such an expeditionary approach involves minimizing the cost and time of new iterations, pursuing simultaneous development wherein technologists, manufacturing engineers, and marketers work together instead of as a relay team, and accumulating market knowledge through successive failures.

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