The Competitive Advantage of Nations

Michael E. Porter Harvard Business Review

90211

HBR

MARCH±APRIL 1990

The Competitive Advantage of Nations

Michael E. Porter

National prosperity is created, not inherited. It does of the patterns of competitive success in ten leading

trading nations, contradict the conventional wisdom not grow out of a country's natural endowments, its

labor pool, its interest rates, or its currency's value, that guides the thinking of many companies and na-

tional governments— and that is pervasive today in
as …ver más…

Author's note: Michael J. Enright, who served as project coordina- without regard for traditional ideology or current in-

tellectual fashion. We need to know, very simply,

tor for this study, has contributed valuable suggestions. what works and why. Then we need to apply it.

Copyright q 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

How Companies Succeed in

International Markets

Around the world, companies that have achieved cumbered by blinding assumptions or conventional

wisdom.

This is why innovators are often outsiders from a

different industry or a different country. Innovation

may come from a new company, whose founder has

international leadership employ strategies that differ a nontraditional background or was simply not ap-

preciated in an older, established company. Or the from each other in every respect. But while every

successful company will employ its own particular capacity for innovation may come into an existing

company through senior managers who are new to strategy, the underlying mode of operation— the

character and trajectory of all successful compa- the particular industry and thus more able to per-

ceive opportunities and more likely to pursue them. nies— is fundamentally the same.

Companies achieve competitive advantage Or