Tag Archives: strategy

David Teece lecture

Just listening to a lecture by David Teece at Goeteborgs
. He takes up many interesting issues, highlights
current trends… and emphasizes the importance of Capabilities.

Some random notes:

Textbooks still have not managed to take the importance of intellectual
assets into account, balance sheets are useless as they still mainly
show physical assets.

In a similar vain, Porters 5 Forces analysis has become much less
usefull, as it focuses on a single industry, and much of the value and
success hinges on the "Salience of co-specialized complementary
capabilities," that is
the combination of capabilities and assets to provide additional
competitive advantage. The example here was the ipod/itunes, both of
which complement each other and are located in different industries.

Overall, the world might be flat, but capabilities are not not equally
distributed (the form mountains and hills), therefore opportunities are
not evenly spread out.

Previous success is no guarantee for future one: Andy Grove, CEO at
Intel (at that time): "Our current market share just gives us a seat at
the table for future technologies" (got the wording wrong).

In the following Q&A session, some things came up:

Frameworks (such as porters 5 forces) are not a theory, they are lenses
that allow us to look at things. In a way they are a "poor men’s theory" 🙂

Overall quite interesting lecture. My favorite quote is one from Winston
Churchill given at Harvard University in 1943: "The empires of the
future are the empires of the mind."

The session was moderated by Maureen McKelvey.