Competitive strategies and their shift to the future

Abstract

Purpose – This article aims to describe the valuable work conducted most recently on competitive strategies. Its purpose is to elaborate on suggestions for theorizing the hybrid form of competitive advantage and stimulate the interest of scholars. Design/methodology/approach – As this article emphasizes hybrid strategies, both electronic and manual methods have detected 15 studies focusing on competitive strategies and their relation to firm performance from 2000 until today. Findings – This article underlines the need to deal more thoroughly with combined-emphasis competitive strategies, which have seriously enhanced Porter’s paradigm, defined in 1980 with three single-emphasis strategic choices. The era in which combining competitive strategies was synonymous with stuck-in-the-middle alternatives has been left behind, and the era in which hybrid strategies suggest the most attractive choices, at least in some circumstances, has already begun. Originality/value – This article is one of the few stressing conceptual issues of hybrid strategies that emerged from Porter’s (1980) model. No matter how many years pass by, research on competitive strategies will continue, as it considers businesses of any age, size, sector or country. The global challenge of today is how scholars will revise theory to better capture reality. This article intensifies the need for a theoretical framework embracing the full variety of competitive strategies, namely, single-emphasis, mixed-emphasis, no-distinctive-emphasis and stuck-in-the-middle. Nonetheless, due to their complex and multidimensional nature, hybrid strategies receive particular attention.

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