Sustainable competitiveness based on resilience and innovation – an alternative approach

Abstract

The pressure to reduce decision time cycles and to be able to react and anticipate competitors is a requisite for survival and the key to success. Therefore, companies should apply new models to increase their competitiveness using new trends and concepts. Based on this need, this paper aims to contribute to the improvement of companies' strategic planning process. With this purpose. it is necessary to review existing models of competitiveness to be able to create an alternative approach. The model proposed combines two new concepts – resilience and innovation – and integrates the principles of sustainability (triple bottom line) as a way to create competitive advantage. This approach also considers business evaluation models, such as the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence model and the Shingo operational excellence model, and tools that reduce the strategic execution gap (for example the balanced scorecard). Establishing a relation between resilience, innovation and sustainable competitiveness, this approach is (1) differentiating, (2) able to add value (more focused and more efficient), (3) applicable to several business sectors and to different levels of technological sophistication and monitoring maturity, and (4) adaptable to distinctive cultural environments. Through differentiated criteria of evaluation, it allows the identification of the current competitive positioning of organizations, and the setting of parameters for implementing sustainable competitiveness.