How does a company sustain competitive advantage?
A. The most popular method of sustaining your advantage right now is relying on discontinuous innovations: new products or paradigms for a solution that are discontinuous, non-evolving, or disruptive. Clayton Christiansen of Harvard Business School has pushed this theory for the last ten years and wrote about disruptive technologies in his book, The Innovators Dilemma. While he fully explains the road to innovation, I define his theory simply as the thing you have to do to prevent a little company from coming along and outdoing you. While embarking on a discontinuous innovation can give you an enormous competitive advantage, it also might disrupt the flow of your organization. Because its development is usually more about function than finance, it is important to take a hard look and see how the innovation relates to your overall corporate mission and how it fits into your core competencies. Whether or not you can sustain this advantage is based on how you go about working within your
