The Explainer: Locating Your Company's Core Competencies

Harvard Business Review · Oct 16, 2026 · 4m

The Explainer: Finding Your Company's Core Competencies

2 Jul 2019

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What does your company do better than anyone else? In the short run, a company’s competitiveness derives from the price/performance attributes of current products. But in the long run, competitiveness derives from an ability to build, at lower cost and more speedily than competitors, the core competencies that spawn unanticipated products. Core competencies are the collective learning in the organization, especially how to coordinate diverse production skills and integrate multiple streams of technologies. Unlike physical…