THE ACCELERATING EVOLUTION OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

The forces and sources of competitive advantage are undergoing a dramatic and accelerated evolution. It’s time to reconsider how you’ll win in the marketplace of the future.

Many factors that provided advantage in the past are increasingly impotent:

• Pricing is now dynamic.

• Products can be easily copied.

• Offerings quickly become “out of date” given the deluge of new alternatives.

• Physical availability is increasingly ubiquitous.

Research from Lindsay Foresight & Stratagem done in 2025 finds not all executives appreciate the degree or impact of this on their future viability, profitability, or growth.

Among the consequences:

• They don’t realize that advantages they had in the past are dissipating.

• When sales stall or their margin disappoints, executives can misdiagnose the cause and apply the wrong cure.

• When that cure doesn’t work, resolving their situation is all the more difficult because time has passed, resources spent and confidence in leadership is in doubt.

Our research also finds that, when asked to articulate their competitive strategy, many companies’ Boards of Directors and executives struggle. They’re not at all aligned. They even struggle to define what would constitute competitive advantage.

Despite a performance dashboard for their company, they’ve no clear metric with which to assess their advantage. Or with which to assess new strategies for their future.

One implication: They misjudge market factors such as AI. (The way many expect to use it will only get them to parity with others.)

Equally unfortunate, many executives are not seeing or studying new drivers of advantage already proving themselves in the marketplace. They’re not seeking the foresight critical to capturing future advantage before competitors.

Among them:

• An extreme focus on the customer. Not just the “job” they need done but the validation of their self-concept and aspirations.

• Operations built for customer centricity.

• An organizational model (ecosystem) built to enable faster and more efficient rates of insight, innovation, personalization, and demand creation.

When a customer-centric ecosystem is strategically designed and well operated, opportunities are captured, revenue per customer increases, barriers to entry are created, and a flywheel of value creation is triggered.

Whatever executives’ current playbook for their organization’s competitive strategy, it should be reconsidered in light of the dramatic and accelerating evolution of the forces and sources of advantage. This review should get underway immediately. After all, it takes time to identify opportunities for future advantage, vet them, align an organization in support of them, then build them out.