ture of the past has dwelt on the concept of finding and keeping Amarket share.@ This concept considered customers a stable and reliable source with verifiable tastes and desires. If a person, for instance, showed a preference for one soft drink over another, that consumption was said to add to the market share of the preferred beverage while diminishing the market share of the other.
This is not the face of the future. The business world is suggesting that the challenge is to look for and attempt to sustain Aopportunity share.@ To continue with the soft drink example just used, the difference would be this. AHow many people can we get to drink this Cola?@ is a Amarket share@ statement. Compare that with AWhat opportunities exist for our Cola product?@ As stated in the handout, AThe question that must be answered by every company is, given their current skills, or competencies as they will be called, what share of future opportunities are likely to be captured?@
This implies an ever-changing flux, an almost amorphous world of human experience in which the company must learn to function. A quite clear statement of this concept is found in Kim and Mauborgne=s (1999) analysis of creating new market space. A[the new success comes from] looking at familiar data from a new perspective; none requires any special vision or foresight about the future@ (Kim & Mauborgne, 1999, 83).
3. Should competition for the future be on a corporate basis?
Traditionally, companies have focused on matching and beating their rivals, a tradition that has tended to divide the business world into segments in which strategies tend to blur. ASuch companies share an implicit set of beliefs about how we compete in our industry or in our strategic group. They share a conventional wisdom about who their customers are and what they value, and about the scope of products and services their industry should be offering@ (Kim & Mauborgne, 1999, 83). Such...