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Erik Brynjolfsson and Glen L. Urban are codirectors of the Center for eBusiness at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and professors at the MIT Sloan School of Business in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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From the Sloan Management Review comes a remarkable collection of articles written by highly regarded experts in the field of e-business. This second book in the MIT SMR Management series is aimed at those seeking to integrate e-business into their enterprises as a way of maintaining-or establishing-competitive advantage. Strategies for E-Business Success offers a roadmap of the fundamental principles and tools executives need to
* Build profitability and earn a solid rate of return on investment
* Avoid being seduced by half-truths that can lead to critical strategic errors
* Create a successful Web strategy
* Concentrate on achieving market leadership rather than technology leadership
* Achieve competitive advantage on the Internet
* Build relationships of trust with their customers
* Explore the best practices of companies that really know their customers
* Understand the strategic value of Internet communities
* Implement an evolutionary approach to the development of software solutions
* Examine the organizational implications of an open-source world

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From the Sloan Management Review comes a remarkable collection of articles written by highly regarded experts in the field of e-business. This second book in the MIT SMR Management series is aimed at those seeking to integrate e-business into their enterprises as a way of maintaining-or establishing-competitive advantage. Strategies for E-Business Success offers a roadmap of the fundamental principles and tools executives need to
* Build profitability and earn a solid rate of return on investment
* Avoid being seduced by half-truths that can lead to critical strategic errors
* Create a successful Web strategy
* Concentrate on achieving market leadership rather than technology leadership
* Achieve competitive advantage on the Internet
* Build relationships of trust with their customers
* Explore the best practices of companies that really know their customers
* Understand the strategic value of Internet communities
* Implement an evolutionary approach to the development of software solutions
* Examine the organizational implications of an open-source world

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Strategies for E-Business Success

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN

Competitive advantage is a concept that often inspires in strategists a form of idol worship-a desire to imitate the strategies that make the most successful companies successful. It is interesting, however, that strategists have viewed precisely opposite factors to be sources of competitive advantage at different points in the histories of a number of industries. For example, Henry Ford's emphasis on focus has been touted right next to General Motors' product-line breadth as the key to success. Today, the outsourcing flexibility inherent in the nonintegrated business models of Cisco Systems and Dell Computer is held up as a model for all to emulate, whereas a generation ago IBM's vertical integration was widely considered an unassailable source of competitive advantage. In the 1980s, power-tool maker Black & Decker aggressively consolidated its diffused international-manufacturing infrastructure into a few global-scale facilities so that it could counter the aggressive market-share gains that Makita had logged by serving the world market from a single plant in Japan. At that very time, Makita was moving aggressively toward manufacturing in smaller-scale local facilities around the world.

Indeed, strategists whose anecdotal understanding of competitive advantage runs only as deep as "If it's good for Cisco, it must be good for everybody" at best are likely to succeed in building yesterday's competitive advantages. If history is any guide, the practices and business models that constitute advantages for today's most successful companies confer those advantages only because of particular factors at work under particular conditions at this particular time.

Historically, several factors have conferred powerful advantages on the companies that possessed them-economies of scale and scope, integration and nonintegration, and process-based core competencies. What are the circumstances that cause each factor to be a competitive advantage? How and why do competitive actions erode the underpinnings of those advantages? Strategists need to peel away the veneer of what works, and understand more deeply why and under what conditions certain practices lead to advantage. In so doing, they might begin to predict successfully which of today's powerful competitive advantages are likely to erode and what might cause new sources of advantage to emerge in the future. (Many of the insights presented here are rooted in work on disruptive innovation presented in my 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.)

ECONOMIES OF SCALE

In the 1960s and 1970s, concepts of competitive advantage often were predicated upon steep scale economics, and many tools of strategic analysis were built upon those economics (for example, growth-share matrices, experience curves, and industry-supply curves). Indeed, scale allowed successful companies such as General Motors and IBM to enjoy lower costs than their competitors. IBM, with 70 percent market share, earned 95 percent of the mainframe-computer industry's profits; General Motors, with 55 percent market share, earned 80 percent of the automobile industry's profits. Today steep scale economics explain the profits and dominant market shares of companies such as Intel, Boeing, and Microsoft.

Steep economies of scale exist when there are high fixed versus variable costs in the predominant business model. Large organizations can amortize the fixed costs over greater volumes, condemning small competitors to playing the game on an adversely sloped playing field.

However, Toyota taught the Western world that many fixed costs aren't ordained by nature but are artifacts of specific technological and managerial solutions to problems. By reducing in-process inventories, setup times for machinery, and the overhead costs inherent in an inventory-intensive batch-manufacturing process, Toyota flattened the scale economics of assembling a car. CAD (computer-aided-design) systems had a similar effect on reducing the fixed, up-front cost of designing a new model. As a result, there is now no relationship between an auto producer's market share and its profitability. Analogous innovations have flattened scale economics in steel, electric-power generation, and computers-and rendered transitory what were once thought to be sustainable advantages.

Strategists in industries that today see leading companies enjoying scale-based competitive advantage ought to ask themselves if the fundamental trade-offs that create today's high fixed costs might change-leveling the playing field in even more situations. Consider Intel. A barrier to potential competitors is the $700 million cost to design a new family of microprocessors and the $3 billion needed to build a new fabrication facility. However, disruptive technologies such as Tensilica's modular microprocessor architecture are flattening the scale economics of design. And small fabrication facilities, or minifabs, could reduce the fixed costs of production. Such technologies take root at the low end of the market first, but they are marching relentlessly up the performance spectrum.

In the pharmaceutical industry, megamergers have created $100 billion behemoths. The logic behind those mergers has been that the huge fixed costs and extraordinary uncertainty associated with clinical trials for new drugs confer ever greater advantages on ever larger companies. Historically, that has indeed been the case. But could something change the underpinnings of those high fixed costs?

Understanding of the human genome will flatten the scale economics in clinical trials. For example, we now understand that there are at least six distinctly different diseases that were once thought to be one disease-leukemia. Each of the six is associated with a specific, unique treatment protocol, and each can be precisely diagnosed through a characteristic pattern among about fifty genes. We now realize that in the past, most of the patients in a clinical trial for a new leukemia treatment didn't have the specific disease being studied. Compounds worked for some patients and not for others; and to determine clinical efficacy with satisfactory statistical results, large numbers of patients needed to be enrolled for long clinical trials. That created huge, front-end fixed costs and steepened the scale economics.

Now, however, a technician can draw a blood sample and compare the pattern in the patient's genes with a template and diagnose specifically which leukemia is present. In the future, 100 percent of the patients in a clinical trial will have the specific disease being studied, and smaller, faster trials will achieve clearer clinical outcomes. Scale will no longer confer superior profits upon larger companies; it will be an albatross. Today's merging companies are moving exactly in the wrong direction at exactly the wrong time because their strategists (and investment bankers) have not thought deeply about cause and effect in competitive advantage.

ECONOMIES OF SCOPE

A second source of competitive advantage, intertwined with scale economics, has been product-line breadth. For example, through the 1970s, Caterpillar's scope gave the company an unassailable advantage in construction equipment against smaller competitors such as Komatsu....