Whatever Happened To The Core Competence Of The Corporation?
In their seminal HBR article, ‘The Core Competence Of The Corporation’, Prahalad and Hamel define ‘core competence’ as “a bundle of skills and technologies that can be leveraged across the enterprise…that provide potential access to a wide variety of markets, makes a significant contribution to perceived customer benefits of the end products, and is difficult for a competitor to imitate”. If these capabilities underpin a corporation’s strategy, it is arguable that corporations with similar capabilities should have similar strategies. Is this the point to where large Drug Development companies have migrated and, if it is, should we be surprised that therapeutic advances across major disease states are ‘more or less’ similar?
If a corporation defined a desired state (no matter how broad) and internalized a roadmap – not necessarily a single route – to enable it to get there, one would anticipate that this organization would build or acquire the core competencies necessary to attain that state. Conceptually therefore, unless desired states were similar, strategies based on core competencies would be different. The reality of the Drug Development industry is that most of the major players are competing for the same opportunity space rendering it quite difficult to engineer truly differentiable strategies based on distinguishable and difficult-to-imitate core competencies. Does this imply that strategies for this sector of the industry are ‘more or less’ the same? If so, who stole the strategy from Strategic Planning?