The following article is the tenth in a series on the activities and research taking place in each academic unit at HBS.

The powerful ideas that come under the umbrella of the School's Competition and Strategy (C&S) unit are making an impact at local, national, and international levels. Whether it's Professor Michael E. Porter's seminal work on the competitive advantage of nations or Professor Cynthia A. Montgomery's recent book on corporate strategy, HBS C&S faculty are a leading voice in the strategic management arena.

Most of the fourteen members of the unit, which grew out of the former Business Policy area, are economists with particular expertise in competitive strategy. Professor Stephen P. Bradley, who heads the unit, is enthusiastic about the group's influence: "We are at the forefront of our field," he says, "doing leading-edge research and having an important impact on practice."

Indeed, C&S faculty have recently published a number of books that have been well received in the academic and business press. Professor Adam M. Brandenburger's Co-opetition, for instance, is a Business Week bestseller while Professor David B. Yoffie's Competing in the Age of Digital Convergence is an authoritative examination of the rapidly evolving digital environment. As they break new ground in their research, C&S faculty are promptly disseminating their research findings into publications, colloquia, and MBA and Executive Education courses.

The C&S unit can be divided, with some overlap, into four areas: competitive strategy, corporate strategy, global competition, and technology strategy. The largest of the subgroups, competitive strategy - essentially the core of the unit - looks at the techniques a firm uses to compete within its industry. Michael Porter's recent research on the theoretical foundations of competitive positioning and sustained competitive advantage fits into this area. He explores these topics in his seminar on Competition and Competitiveness as well as in a recent Harvard Business Review article "What Is Strategy?" In a forthcoming book, Porter challenges traditional views about the source of Japan's competitive success.

Professor Pankaj Ghemawat, head of the unit's required course, Competition and Strategy, focuses on strategic commitments - decisions that involve significant amounts of irreversibility, such as entry into new markets, exit from old ones, capacity expansion, and product and process innovation. Ghemawat is the author of a widely cited book, Commitment, as well as seminal articles on the sustainability of competitive advantage. His latest book, Games Businesses Play, will be published this year. Along with a number of colleagues, he has also begun looking at how competitive shocks affect industry structure and business strategy in emerging markets.

Adam Brandenburger and Assistant Professor Harborne W. Stuart, Jr., have worked together over a number of years, developing a theory of business that emphasizes entrepreneurship, joint action, and the creation of value. Their work shows that value creation is an interdependent process in which an enterprise must align itself with customers, suppliers, employees, and many others. In addition to being the foundation of Brandenburger's book Co-opetition (coauthored with Yale's Barry J. Nalebuff), this theory is also the basis of the MBA elective Changing the Game that he currently teaches. A game theorist, Professor Elon Kohlberg is studying the foundations of the equilibrium concept in game theory, which has been at the heart of much of the economic research on competitive strategy over the past fifteen years. Last fall, Kohlberg taught Analytical Reasoning, a new elective he developed around his research.

Associate Professor Anita M. McGahan, with Michael Porter, is working on a series of statistical papers on the sources of company and industry profitability. McGahan currently teaches the elective Strategy, Commitment, and Choice, which focuses on strategy at the business-unit level. Assistant Professor Kenneth S. Corts studies competition in segmented markets and the relationships between firms and their distributors.

In the area of technology, Stephen Bradley and David Yoffie have both hosted on-campus research colloquia. "Multi-media and the Boundaryless World" featured the research of Bradley and his frequent collaborator Professor Richard L. Nolan, a member of the School's MIS Interest Group. Bradley and Nolan will soon publish Sense and Respond: Capturing the Value of Network Era Technologies, a book that documents the technology-aided shift many companies are currently undertaking from a "make-and-sell" mentality to one in which they are able to "sense and respond" to customers' actual requirements in real time. Bradley's 1993 book (edited with Nolan and Jerry Hausman), Globalization, Technology, and Competition, examines changes driven by the integration of computers and telecommunications in the 1990s. The pair's research is the basis of two new MBA electives, Competing in the Informa-tion Age and Business and the Internet: Strategy, Law, and Policy.

Yoffie's Competing in the Age of Digital Convergence, the recent book he edited from the proceedings of his 1994 colloquium, addresses the merging of computer, telecommunications, and consumer electronics technologies. His work suggests that competitive advantage is achieved more effectively through creative combinations of available technologies and smart management than through radical technological innovations. He has also published on topics such as strategic management, international trade, and global competition in high-tech industries.

Professor Richard S. Rosenbloom, with almost four decades of service on the HBS faculty, is an editor of and contributor to Engines of Innovation: U.S. Industrial Research at the End of an Era, published last year. He teaches Technology and Competitive Strategy, an elective that examines the strategic choices posed by emerging technologies.

Looking at corporate strategy, Cynthia Montgomery and Associate Professor David J. Collis recently published Corporate Strategy: Resources and the Scope of the Firm, a work that presents an integrated framework for analyzing corporate strategy. Central to the book is the idea that a firm's business and corporate level are inextricably linked: most corporate-level advantage is ultimately realized through enhanced performance at the business-unit level. This is made possible by leveraging critical resources and capabilities across businesses. Collis and Montgomery have also developed an Executive Education program, Creating Corporate Advantage, and an elective MBA course based on this framework. Also in corporate strategy, Assistant Professor Tarun Khanna is studying the corporate strategy of diversified business groups in several emerging economies in Asia and Latin America.

Global competition lends itself to much overlap with the other subgroups of the C&S unit. Here, Khanna and Ghemawat are both studying corporate strategy in developing countries. Yoffie's work, including Beyond Free Trade: Firms, Governments, and Global Competition, a book that he edited, has a global perspective as does Porter's The Competitive Advantage of Nations. Indeed, Porter has published books on the national competitiveness initiatives in New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland, and his Competitive Strategy has been translated into seventeen languages.

Bradley is proud not only of the Competition and Strategy faculty members' contributions to their field but also the way "each of them integrates his or her research and course development." Concludes Bradley, "We work on building theory that, in turn, has an impact on practice."

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