Technical competitive advantage

When success is achieved, it has to be maintained in a commercial environment. Hence even very successful products can become easily and rapidly superseded. Even when success has been sustained over a long period of time adaptation and improvement has been necessary in order to maintain competitive advantage. For instance, the glucose isomerase and penicilhn acylases used now are very much improved over those originally commercialised 20 years ago. This is partially due to technical advances and partially due to continuously increasing consumer and customer demands and standards. 

A key to this condensation step is to think primarily in terms of what the decision maker or investor needs to know to make a decision in your favor. Thinking in these terms usually (a) eliminates technical detail unrelated to competitive advantage, (b) boils financials down to aggregate numbers and key profitably statistics such as time to breakeven and return on investment, and (c) increases the use of familiar products and companies as analogies. 

Read the Wall Street Journal for one week, collecting one article each day that discusses technical opportunities that various companies are considering or exploiting. Try to choose articles from the same or a related industry. In each of the articles identify key points of competitive advantage for the particular opportunity and in a short essay discuss whether those advantages are likely to be sustainable using Porter s five forces analysis. 

Catalyst performance must continually improve to keep a product technically superior. Successful catalyst research programs coupled with production cost minimization may allow a plant to be run at capacity while its competitor shuts down or operates at a lower capacity and reduced profit margin. In many instances, finding the competitive advantage is essential to business survival. Finding or making the most cost-effective catalyst is a strong incentive for catalysis research. 

However, in some cases, trade secret protection may constitute a competitive advantage by sustaining marketplace confidentiality [14], If the technical details of an innovation remain secret, it is often difficult for competitors to recreate a product, invent around it, or improve on it, especially if the innovation is complex. These latter types of activities are commonly known as competitor piggy-backing. If adequate confidentiality measures are put in place and enforced, trade secret can be an effective method of protecting information from the public and securing a market sector monopoly [15]. 

Additionally, continnons improvement encompasses the realization that technological advances will resnlt in presently unavailable solutions. A risk reduction option that is either not feasible and/or too costly today may well become feasible both technically and economically in the future. Many snch advancements, while having key safety and secnrity benefits, may also resnlt in better performance and additional competitive advantages. Examples of these types of changes may inclnde ... 

Table 23.1 Potential competitive advantages for the technical use of SILP/SCILL materials - exemplified for catalytic applications.

The value chain is a systematic approach to examining the development of competitive advantage. The chain consists of a series of activities that create and build value. They culminate in the total value delivered by an organization. To analyse the specific activities through which a firm can create a competitive advantage, it is useful to model the firm as a chain of value-creating activities. A value network is a business analysis perspective that describes social and technical resources within and between businesses (Porter 1985). 

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