Is Sustainable Competitive Advantage an Achievable Holy Grail: The Relevance Gap between Academia and Business

Authors

Chiquan Guo, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2007

Abstract

Competitive advantage, especially sustainable competitive advantage, is one of the most celebrated concepts in business research and strategic management fields in particular. It is a common belief that competitive advantage leads to superior performance, and sustainable competitive advantage leads to prolonged superior performance. To survive and prosper in an ever-competitive marketplace where firms operate on a global scale, businesspeople are in dire need of critical information and knowledge that will lend them a competitive edge over their rivals in search for regional, national, international, or global dominance. In fighting for their relevance, business scholars churn out volumes of research, trying their very best to discover, develop, and accumulate knowledge that may be useful for practitioners. This paper takes a close look at the relevance issue between management research and practice, pointing out that researchers must be realistic about their research agenda and practitioners must have reasonable expectations in order for both parties to foster a better and mutually beneficial relationship.

Comments

Content on the JBM by the ICEB is licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
(CC BY-NC 4.0) International license

Recommended Citation

Guo, C. (2007) ‘Is Sustainable Competitive Advantage an Achievable Holy Grail: The Relevance Gap between Academia and Business’, Journal of Business and Management, 13(2), pp. 115–126.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Publication Title

Journal of Business and Management