Breakthrough Strategies For Seizing Control Of Your

Industry And Creating The Markets Of Tomorrow

Competing For The Future

(GARY HAMEL and C.K. PRAHALAD/

Havard Business School Press/April 1996/$14.95)

Competing For The Future

Breakthrough Strategies For Seizing Control Of Your Industry
And Creating The Markets Of Tomorrow
MAIN IDEA
The companies and business organizations that will prosper in the future are those that

1. Succeed in improving the quality of life of their customers by creating new products
and services that deliver unexpected benefits.
2. Create a viable and meaningful way for employees to contribute personally to the
success of the firm.
3. Manage to invent and then dominate new competitive space in consumer markets.

In essence, competing for the future means thinking and acting in new and
unconventional ways. It requires identifying how the future will be different,
understanding what these differences will mean to consumers, mobilizing the company
to position itself advantageously in that new environment and getting to the future before
any competitors do. Along the way, techniques like expeditionary marketing and
attempting to achieve global preemption will play a role.

The end result? A company can not only imagine the future it wants to enjoy, but actively
create it.

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Main Idea
Competing for the future means to identify, create and then dominate emerging market
opportunities -- before your competitors have the opportunity to exploit them. In essence,
competing for the future requires you to anticipate and execute before your competitors
are even aware of the need.
Supporting Ideas
Companies that compete for the future of their markets are proactive in anticipating and
shaping the future direction of their markets, rather than simply reacting to the strategic
moves of consumers and their direct competitors. By doing this, the emerging market
opportunities of the future are created and exploited.
There are four initiatives around which any effort to compete for the future will be built:

Each of these initiatives will require a new and innovative strategic framework which will
differ from that previously used. The company or organization that can build and apply
the new strategy first will automatically get to the future ahead of everyone else.
The race to the future takes place in three phases which, while distinct, almost always
overlap in the real world:

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Management attention must, of necessity, vary according to the current phase. During
Phase 1, for example, the focus of management must be on origination of new ideas. In
Phase 2, negotiation will be the primary activity of managers. And only during Phase 3 -around which most current generation strategic planning focuses -- will the focus shift to
the types of activities which currently engage most managers.
Key Thoughts
Getting to the future first is not just about outrunning competitors bent on reaching the
same prize. It is also about having ones own view of what the prize is. There can be as
many prizes as runners; imagination is the only limiting factor. In business, what
distinguishes leaders from laggards, and greatness from mediocrity, is the ability to
uniquely imagine what could be.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
The wealth of a firm, and of each nation in which it operates, largely depends on its
role in creating tomorrows markets and its ability to capture a disproportionate share of
associated revenues and profits.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
Failure to anticipate and participate in the opportunities of the future impoverishes both
firms and nations. The future is not an extrapolation of the past. New industrial
structures will supersede old industrial structures. Opportunities that at first blush seem
evolutionary will prove to be revolutionary. Todays new niche markets will turn out to be
tomorrows mass markets.

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--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

If strategy is seen only as a positioning game, it will be difficult for a company to avoid
becoming trapped in an endless game of catch-up with far-sighted competitors.
Conceiving of strategy as a quest to proactively configure nascent industries, or
fundamentally reconfigure existing industries to ones own advantage, is a very different
perspective than a view of strategy as positioning individual businesses and products
within todays competitive environment.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
We believe that managers are spending too much time managing the present and not
enough creating the future.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
Like a grizzled old mechanic who bemoans the complexity of modern automobiles,
incumbents typically have an understandable incentive to preserve the existing
economic engine. Yet it is hard to imagine any circumstance in which a firm wouldnt
benefit more from proactively managing industry evolution, even when the industry is
evolving in a way that undermines the efficiency of the firms current profit engine, than
from letting someone else control the pace and direction of industry evolution.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
Our emphasis has always been to make something out of nothing.
--Masaru Ibuka, founder, SONY
Any company that wants to capture a disproportionate share of profits from tomorrows
markets must build the competencies that will make a disproportionate contribution to
future customer value.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

Main Idea
To identify the market opportunities of the future, a new vision will be required,
incorporating these strategic elements:

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Identifying the future involves creating a vision of where the company should be in the
future to succeed.
Supporting Ideas
Quite frequently, the hardest thing for a company to do is to attempt to unlearn what it
currently does in order to allow fresh market insights to bubble through to the surface.
The traditional bias, within any organization, tends to be to look at the future in terms of
what worked in the past. This, however, can be quite limiting.
Therefore, the existing business model must be broken down and re-examined, along
these lines:

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Most frequently, a company will refuse to consider walking away from its past unless it
realizes there is a clear and present danger to its ongoing existence.
To be able to forget its past, a company must alter its corporate genetics -- the set of
biases, industry acts, presuppositions, assumptions, beliefs and preferences carried
around in the heads of its management team. The company must also strive to develop
worthwhile industry foresight -- a vision of where the industry is heading in the future.
To develop industry foresight:
1. Be able to answer three critical questions:
What new benefits should be provided in the future?
Which competencies are required to deliver the benefits?
How will the customer interface vary in the future?
These are the three elements from which any vision of the future will be constructed -and competed upon.
1. Look at trends occurring in technology, regulation, demographics or lifestyle -- and

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visualize how those trends may reprioritize industry rules and lead to the creation of new
and additional competitive space.
2. Keep an open mind on what might happen within the marketplace -- rather than
foreordaining winners before the marketplace has spoken.
3. Encourage everyone at every level of the organization to focus on foresight -- and to
articulate their point of view about how the future will unfold. Encourage discussion.
4. Start by imagining what could be in the industry. Then work backwards. Consider
what must happen, if that scenario actually is realized. Can those intermediate steps be
realized -- bringing about significant long-term changes.
5. Look for opportunities to enlarge the companys opportunity horizon -- unexploited
business areas where the companys current competencies can be successfully applied
in the development of an entirely new business.
6. Try functional thinking. Instead of simply looking at traditional services and products,
take a functional perspective. What benefits are people deriving from products or
services? How could these benefits be delivered differently, or more efficiently? Does
that create any new opportunities or competitive space?
7. Try a child-like approach. Dont assume anything is impossible. Evaluate how things
should be -- rather than the way everyone currently accepts they are. Focus on any
insights this exercise may suggest.
8. Search for metaphors, analogies and unusual hybrid combinations of products and
services.
9. Take every opportunity to be a contrarian -- to challenge conventional wisdom and
break conventions.
10. Develop empathy and awareness of basic human needs, combined with an
understanding of how consumer react emotionally to your product or service.
Key Thoughts
Any company that drives forward while looking out the rear view mirror will, sooner or
later, run into a brick wall. Similarly, any company whose stake in the past or present is
bigger than its stake in the future runs the risk of becoming a laggard.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of
products they want. The public does not know what is possible, but we do.
--Akio Morita, SONY

Main Idea
Once the future has been imagined, it must then be translated into reality. That requires

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a robust strategic architecture:

When a company understands the future, it can develop a map for getting from where it
currently is to where it wants to be in the future.
Supporting Ideas
Taking a company or organization from where it is today to where it needs to be in the
future requires a migration path -- built around an underlying framework of a well
conceived strategic architecture. In essence, the strategic architecture is the high-level
blueprint for the new company.
A good strategic architecture:
1. Identifies precisely what the company must start doing immediately to be well
positioned in the future.
2. Serves as a link between the present and the future.
3. Serves an opportunity approach function -- identifying which competencies should be
acquired now for future needs.
4. Details how the interface with consumers will change and evolve over time.
5. Keeps larger picture issues in focus without so much detail the essential direction
becomes obscured.
6. Focuses on the market-making opportunities of the future.
7. Adds more and greater detail through the process of successive approximations -regular updates and refinements as more details become available.
Some of the practical things a company can do to create a viable strategic architecture
are:
1.Ask the question: Given our unique set of competencies, what can we do better than
anyone else in the world -- and what new business opportunities does that generate?
at every level of the company.
2. Form a strategic architecture council -- drawn from every division of the company -- to

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identify new business opportunities that could be exploited.

3. Organize a company wide event at which people from every level of the organization
can participate in challenging and rethinking the corporate assumptions, key aspirations
and directions.
4. Form strategic alliances and other associations with other organizations with different
sets of skills and competencies. See what kind of hybrid products and services become
possible.
5. Ask senior managers to summarize their answers to the question, How will the future
of our industry be different? Evaluate the answers -- even what the future means to
different people may be as illuminating as the ideas put forward. Consider how broad
the answers are. Determine whether the company poses a competitive challenge to any
other organization in the future -- or whether it remains locked in the past.
6. Encourage ambiguity and avoid making commitments to large, irreversible allocations
of resources. Realize that flexibility in strategic architecture is not only desirable but
essential.
7. Look for opportunities to develop a set of significant milestones along the envisaged
path. Be flexible about the specifics of how the move to the future will be realized.
8. Once an emerging opportunity has been decided upon, be prepared to make tightly
targeted investments in competencies, distribution channels, brands, product
development programs and so forth. Dont stay uncommitted -- get into the marketplace.
9. Learn by doing -- get alongside key customers, perform market testing, undertake
projects with potential competitors, study competing technologies.
Key Thoughts
An architect must be capable of dreaming of things not yet created -- a cathedral
where there is now a dusty plain, or an elegant span across a chasm that hasnt yet
been crossed. But an architect must also be capable of producing a blueprint for how to
turn the dream into reality. An architect is both a dreamer and a draftsman. An architect
marries art with structural engineering. A strategic architecture must be seen as a work
in progress. As one moves forward and acquires insight into the most attractive
technologies, the best delivery vehicles and the exact nature of customer needs,
investment priorities become clearer and bets less equivocal. One then adds the wiring
diagrams, the plumbing, the bricks and mortar and the interior fittings to the broad
structural architecture.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
The goal of competition for industry foresight is, at one level, simple: to build the best
possible assumption base about the future and thereby develop the prescience needed
to proactively shape industry evolution. Competition for industry foresight is essentially
competition to establish ones company as the intellectual leader in terms of influence
over the direction and shape of industry transformation. Industry foresight gives a
company the potential to get to the future first and stake out a leadership position.
Industry foresight allows the company to control the evolution of its industry and,
thereby, its destiny. The trick is to see the future before it arrives.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

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Main Idea
The race to the future of any market does not go to the company with the greatest
resources at the start of the race. Rather, the winner is invariably the company that is
the most resourceful - that has the clearest vision of the future around which the energy
and efforts of the entire organization are focused.
To be resourceful, a company must utilize a new strategy:

In short, stretching and using leverage provides the fuel for the journey the company
must go on if it is to arrive at the intended future circumstances.
Supporting Ideas
Good companies use strategic intent to bring their vision of the future to life, and to
motivate and unite employees. Strategic intent:
1. Conveys a sense of the direction the company needs to be heading in order to
compete successfully in the future -- and invites everyone to use their creativity and
initiative in the pursuit of that goal.
2. Has an emotional element -- something employees will relate to and perceive as
worthwhile.
3. Injects a sense of discovery -- that the company is differentiating itself by staking out
new competitive territory where nobody else has gone before.
4. Implies a sense of destiny -- that by achieving its objective, the company will make a
meaningful difference in the lives of people.
The companys strategic intent must then be personalized for each employee. This is
usually achieved by setting concise challenges or objectives that are milestones
towards the long-term vision. As each milestone is achieved and reported on -- through
the use of whatever statistical measures are appropriate -- the next milestone is
highlighted, and the cycle repeated until a number of small steps have progressed the
company towards its larger objective.
Since a firms strategic intent will always outstretch its current operating realities, there
will always be some underlying dynamics around the difference. Planning and

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budgeting practices, for example, may conspire to let what is immediately feasible
crowd out what is ultimately desirable. The only way to break this potential impasse is
through business leadership -- by having leaders who view strategy as a stretch of
where the company should be heading rather than as a straight jacket limiting the
company to repeat what it has already done over and over.
Ultimately, the gap between aspirations and resources must be bridged. The best way
to do that, however, is not by scaling back aspirations but by creating leverage -- in
short, by increasing the impact of the companys resource base combined with a parallel
effort to secure greater resources.
There are five ways resource leverage can be achieved:
1. By concentrating resources on key strategic goals rather than spreading them over
more initiatives. This is done by:
Eliminating competing goals.
Maintaining consistency over extended periods.
Focusing on goals that are the most important.
Targeting activities that create the most added value.
2. By being more efficient at accumulating resources. This includes the ability to learn
from experience and extract valuable lessons for productivity enhancements. It will also
embody strategic alliances, joint venture, licensing arrangements and other commercial
tie-ups under which the resources of third parties can be borrowed or harnessed. In this
context, the organizations ability to absorb the insights gained is an important factor.
Resources can also be accumulated by forming links with suppliers, sharing
development risks with key customers, acquiring resources on more favorable terms in
specific geographical locations or seeking government funding for research projects or
the like.
3. By combining resources to create synergy and added value. Resources can be
combined to create added value by:
Blending -- integrating a number of systems together.
Balancing -- combining the results of a host of programs.
Recycling -- applying expertise from one area to others.
Co-opting -- forming a group to fight a common enemy.
Protecting -- picking fights carefully to minimize risk.
4. By finding effective ways to conserve and use resources more efficiently.
5. By minimizing the time between the application of resources and payback. The more
rapidly a company can begin generating revenues, the greater the advantage it has over
its competitors.
Key Thoughts
"If we only had more resources, we could be more strategic, " is an opinion frequently
voiced by managers. Yet with a view of strategy as stretch and leverage, it is apparent
that the real issue for many of these managers is not a lack of resources, but too many
priorities, too little stretch and too little creative thinking about how to leverage resources.
Its no wonder many of these managers feel they are resource-constrained: In a sense,

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they are. But showering them with more resources, in the absence of a fundamental
improvement in their capacity to leverage resources, would provide no more than
temporary relief of their frustrations.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
Although an abundance of resources, or slack, enables firms to be strategic in an
investment sense, it does nothing to enhance the wisdom of strategic decisions.
resource abundance and the attendant ability to make multiple bets and to sustain
multiple failures too often substitute for disciplined and creative strategic thinking.
Bigger bets sometimes bring bigger payoffs, but theyre just as likely to bring bigger
disasters. In the absence of an aspiration that outstrips a firms resources and a
capacity for resource leverage, abundance is likely to be little more than a license for
carelessness in strategic decision making.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

Main Idea
The payoff occurs when a company converts intellectual leadership into market
leadership before its competitors do. Again, this will require a new strategy with the
following elements:

This initiative focuses on how the company can survive the transition from current

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circumstances to the market conditions of the future.

Supporting Ideas
The advantages of getting to the future first are:
1. An installed base of users can be created and leveraged.
2. Greater control over the companys own destiny.
3. Stronger positioning and mindshare with consumers.
4. The ability to learn from actual market experience sooner.
5. The opportunity to completely dominate the new market.
6. The opportunity to set standards in the new industry.
7. The opportunity to influence migration paths to the industry.
8. Attractiveness as a coalition partner is enhanced.
Generally speaking, around 10 years is required to build world-class competency in any
specific area of business. Also, interestingly, the route any company takes to get there
will be quite unique -- what works for one company will not necessarily produce
equivalent results for another.
This is particularly significant in the area of core competencies -- the capabilities that lie
at the heart of generating and sustaining competitive commercial advantage.
A core competency:
1. Is a bundle of integrated skills and technologies rather than one specific or discrete
skill or technology.
2. Contributes meaningfully to long-term corporate or organizational prosperity by.
Providing customer-perceived added value.
Being a unique point of differentiation.
Generating a broad array of new products and services.
3. Is not an asset that will show up on a balance sheet -- such as a brand, factory,
distribution channel or patent.
4. Increases in value over time if properly managed rather than becoming outmoded
and replaceable.
Competition to develop a core competency takes place over four distinct levels:
1. Competition to Acquire Various Components The various skills and technologies at
the heart of the competency are built or acquired.
2. Competition to Synthesize Skills, technologies and know-how are blended together to
create more added value for that competency.
3. Competition to Supply Core Products or Platforms To achieve economies of scale,
companies then compete to provide sub-systems to other original equipment
manufacturers (OEMs) who will brand and market the products.
4. Competition to Maximize End Market Share To sell more than anyone else, through a
mix of own brands and OEM arrangements.
Viewing a company from a core competency perspective rather than from a business
unit viewpoint is always going to be more productive and useful from a business
strategy perspective.

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To develop a core competency perspective, a company must:

1. Identify and understand the core competencies currently owned by the company or
organization. By producing an inventory of competencies that generate added value
(from the customers perspective), managers increase their sensitivity to their most
important success drivers.
2. Develop an acquisition plan and agenda for the addition of new core competencies
which will be required to:
Improve competitiveness in existing markets.
Extend the business into unexploited existing markets.
Create new combination or hybrid products and services.
Create entirely new products that target exciting markets.
3. Go about building new core competencies systematically and thoroughly, with
consistency of direction and stability of leadership.
4. Be willing to reallocate core competency assets to those parts of the business where
the greatest future benefits can be derived, rather than those areas where traditional
results have been generated. (This will generally require a corporate culture than
understands and values core competencies highly).
5. Protect and defend its core competencies by:
Appointing internal guardians and stewards.
Conducting regular benchmark comparative tests.
Building an inner core of competency specialists.
Watching for erosive practices or habits that may creep in.
Articulating and highlighting competency priorities.
Key Thoughts
The core competence perspective is not a natural one in most companies. Typically,
the lost basic sense of corporate identity is built around market-focused entities, often
called "strategic business units" rather than around core competencies. Whereas it is
entirely appropriate to have a strong end-product focus in an organization, this needs to
be supplemented by an equally explicit core competence focus. A company must be
viewed not only as a portfolio of products and services, but a portfolio of competencies
as well.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

Main Idea
Expeditionary marketing is all about finding out where the heart of the end-user market
actually lies. Being successful in expeditionary marketing usually requires:
1. A pre-existing brand name awareness.
2. A strong channel of distribution.

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3. The capacity to roll-out products quickly and efficiently

The key lies in maximizing the return of learning for investment -- that is, in learning
faster than competitors where the market is headed in the future.
Supporting Ideas
Since the objective is to reach the future quicker than a competitor can, expeditionary
marketing is of vital importance -particularly for emerging markets where no other
historical information exists.
Every new product launch team believes they will hit the bulls eye in terms of customer
demand and requisite product performance offered, but very few ever do. In fact, the
only worthwhile learning any company ever does is when it places its product offerings
in front of consumers and sees whether or not they respond.
What counts most in expeditionary marketing is not hitting the bulls eye first time, but in
staying active in the market long enough to learn how your product offering needs to be
altered to make it more attractive to its intended market.
With that in mind, the amount of time and cost required to launch each new product
offering becomes of paramount interest. The faster, and more cost effectively, a
company can repackage and relaunch a product package, the better. (And that also
requires the company or organization to have a healthy tolerance for new product
failures as a good way to learn rather than the kiss of death for a corporate career).
The heart of expeditionary marketing is to get into the marketplace and learn from
customers what works and what doesnt work while potential competitors are still
fiddling around in the labs. Of course, that desire to learn must be balanced against the
potential damage to the value of a brand name that would result from the introduction of
products that are only half-finished or ill equipped to deliver the promised benefits.
Key Thoughts
Global brands are emerging because the companies that make and market them are
becoming global organizations. The brand is a by-product of organizational experience
and business systems (which is what we truly leverage rather than some catchy name).
So why do organizations, including my own, continue to strive for worldwide brands? I
believe they are really rallying points or symbols for the organization itself, for the
experience and knowledge it brings to the marketing of soft drinks, cigarettes or beer.
--Michael Jordan, CEO, Westinghouse
Expeditionary marketing represents a practical approach to reconnoitering the markets
of the future only if the arrows are not gold plated, and if it doesnt take months or years
to recalibrate ones aim and shoot again.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

Main Idea
Companies that launch and establish their products first into global markets derive four
benefits:

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1. They maximize returns on innovation.

2. They lock up national distribution channels.
3. They build mind-share amongst consumers.
4. They are positioned to spread from market to market rapidly.
Supporting Ideas
The first-mover advantage in business can be quite significant to long-term business
prospects. To fully exploit a new product or technology, a global presence is required.
Otherwise, large and significant commercial opportunities can be lost to faster-moving
competitors.
Most of the worlds most successful commercial enterprises establish a banner brand
under which their global marketing programs are arranged. This can be conceptualized
as: Consumers Banner Business Core Core Brand Units Products Competencies

Some companies use a corporate name as the banner brand, a product family name or
something entirely different. The primary goal of a banner brand is to predispose
consumers to try new products as they become available, thereby securing the
first-mover advantages for the firm and preempting any competitive moves which may
subsequently be made.
The best banner brands:
1. Have recognition and awareness amongst consumers.
2. Have a reputation built on historical performance.

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3. Have affinity to the consumer -- they mean something.

4. Are plausible in application to a variety of different areas.
A strong and vibrant banner brand will drive new products or services quickly into the
major consumer markets -- making it more difficult for competitors to stake out any
market share. They provide a sustainable competitive advantage in the race to the
future, and properly exploited, can be an important element in the quest to secure the
first-mover advantages.

Main Idea
If a company aspires to industry leadership, it must differentiate itself by thinking and
acting differently about three key topics:
1. Competitiveness
2. Business strategy
3. The organization of the firm
Supporting Ideas
Taking each of these three areas in turn:
1. Thinking and acting differently about competitiveness
Most frequently, the search for the underlying drivers of a sustainable competitive
advantage is too narrow (in terms of time frame and market definition) or too shallow (in
terms of focusing on superficial differences rather than the underlying strategic
framework). As a result, most competitive advantages can be summarized as:
1. Find an attractive industry segment.
2. Buy low.
3. Sell high.
In other words, the traditional analysis of competitiveness focuses on the "what" factor
(what does the company do differently?) rather than the more perceptive "why" factor
(why did the current market evolve that way, and where is it headed in the future?) To
compete successfully for the future, a firm must focus on the "why" more extensively
than on the "what" factors.
In the broader business context, the driving force behind any companys development is
its corporate genetic code -- the way the business managers are inclined to act and the
way they think about their product or service offering, their target market and so forth.
To race to and compete successfully in the future, companies must:
1. Understand the implicit conventions they use.
2. Understand how these conventions can limit thinking.
3. Consider deliberately any industry discontinuities.
4. Build a framework for gathering industry foresight.
5. Work to build strategic architecture.
2. Thinking and acting differently about business strategy

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To be able to compete in the future, a company needs:

1. A view of the future -- industry foresight.
2. A blueprint for getting there -- strategic architecture.
In general, most strategic planning is incremental while strategic architecture opens up
new markets and focuses on new business opportunities. Strategic planning often
focuses on tactics and operational issues facing business units. Strategic architecture,
by contrast, looks at the way the industry can be reshaped to the firms advantage in the
future, which core competencies will be required in the marketplace of the future, how to
go about securing those resources or building them now and so forth.
In short, strategic architecture:
1. Has a long-term view of shaping an industry.
2. Uses leverage to achieve corporate aspirations.
3. Integrates the idea of stretching to grow.
4. Encourages consistency and constancy of effort.
3. Thinking and acting differently about business organization
Most attention in recent times has focused on the transition from a centralized,
bureaucratic technology-led corporate organization to a decentralized, empowered
consumer-led organizational style. Yet inevitably, all this achieves is trading one set of
problems for another.
A better approach is to form a hybrid business organization that contains the best
features of both approaches. The central framework for this type of organization are
core competencies.
A company that is organized around core competencies:
1. Is focused on customer benefits first and foremost.
2. Makes decisions collectively.
3. Encourage original actions on behalf of managers.
4. Develops interlinkages between business units.
5. Drives unity through a shared sense of direction.
6. Allows employees to be activists and not just reactivists.
7. Is positioned to achieve real growth.
Key Thoughts
Our point of view is one that emphasizes building more than downsizing, organic
growth more than deal-making, industry redfinement more than process engineering,
long-term possibility more than short-term feasibility, leveraging resources more than
allocating resources and striving more than arriving.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
If the goal is industry leadership, restructuring and reengineering are not enough. To
build leadership, a company must be capable of regenerating its core strategies. In this
sense, it is not enough to get smaller and better; a company must also have the
capacity to become different. But to ultimately "be" different, a company must first
"think" differently.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad
In Detroit most product-development dollars are spent on modest improvements to

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existing products and most market research money is spent on studying what
customers like among available products. In 10 years of developing the minivan, we
never once got a letter from a housewife asking us to develop one. To the skeptics, that
proved there wasnt a market out there.
--Hal Sperlich, Chrysler
Developing new competencies and reconnoitering new competitive space can be the
work of a decade or more. Yet despite the studied pace of competence acquisition and
market exploration, the final dash to the finish line can be an all-out, pell mell sprint. This
is particularly likely when several competitors have been working in parallel to develop
needed competencies and market insights, and simultaneously come to believe after a
round or two of expeditionary marketing, that the market is finally "ripe". This last, mad
scramble for the finish line is a race to preempt competitors in key markets, to capture
market leadership in the biggest and fastest growing national markets, and bank the
rewards of pioneering.
--Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

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