The Role of Strategic Problem Identification and Formulation in Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage

Uncovering and addressing shifts in customers’ needs in response to economic, political, social, and technological disruption is a proven strategy to create and sustain competitive advantage. However, as the energy practice director for a Canadian professional IT services firm, I discovered cognitive biases and organization structure impediments undermine customers’ ability to articulate what they needed. For the same reasons, we also struggled to prioritize those market opportunities offering the greatest potential value ex ante. This thesis outlines my journey as a practitioner-scholar to address this problem-of-practice: how do firms reliably identify new sources of competitive advantage ex ante during periods of higher environmental turbulence?Practitioner-scholars are uniquely positioned to address the problem-of-practice and bridge the rigor-relevance gap. My thesis consists of three papers that present the results of my abductive research process and outlines my practitioner-scholar research framework. The first paper kicks off my abductive research process where I examine, through a single case-study, how CSL Limited identified and captured new sources of competitive advantage ahead of larger rivals. Drawing on the problem-solving perspective, I posit CSL’s focus on identifying and resolving strategic problems acted as the catalyst to identify and capture new sources of competitive advantage. Then, I propose a business-problem typology and portfolio approach to illustrate how managers may apply these learnings. The second paper is the next step in my abductive research process. I create a conceptual model and hypotheses to deductively test the relationship between customer-problem-formulation-by-the-sale-function and new product development (NPD) performance. NPD is risky and managers are interested in contextual specific factors that both increase mean level returns with lower associated variability (narrower dispersion of returns) to optimize the risk-reward trade-off. Applying the multiplicative heteroscedasticity estimation methodology, I find increasing stakeholder engagement and during periods of higher environmental turbulence increase NPD mean-level returns and lowers associated variability. The third paper presents my practitioner-scholar research framework, contributions, and path forward to drive my research and address the problem of practice as a practitioner-scholar.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Business, Haskayne School of Business

Grantor

Haskayne School of Business

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Ward, Mark P.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Osiyevskyy, Oleksiy

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Dewald, James R.
• Radford, Scott, R.

• competitive advantage
• problem-solving perspective
• sales
• environmental turbulence
• new product development
• design-led innovation
• practitioner-scholarship

Language dc:language.iso

English

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/dspace/41288

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/116444