Collaborative Advantage

In the future, says Dyer, a professor of management at Brigham Young University, competitive advantage will increasingly be created by teams of companies rather than by a single firm. It's what he calls "collaborative advantage," based on ever-closer partnerships between companies in the "extended enterprise" of a value chain. To illustrate his point, he draws on a detailed study of the automotive industry. The focus is on Toyota and Chrysler, two companies that, says Dyer, "have achieved staggering performance advantages relative to their major competitors … in large part because they have created more effective extended enterprises."