Achieving Sustained Competitive Advantage for Project-Based Organizations

Abstract

Many renowned organizations have come and go in past decades because markets in which they once thrived changed. Many factors can play a role why established organizations are slow to understand and react on external changes that create paradigm shifts. This is a universal dilemma; however established project-based organizations struggle in finding an optimum in distributing its resources between exploitation (production) and exploration (R&D). This research contributes to current understandings on achieving sustained competitive advantage by means of a value-based case study. Sustained competitive advantage is about being competitive now and in the future. For ensuring the latter, provisions can be made such that an organization can react to external changes in a timely manner; a process coined Contextual Vigilance in this report. To support decision-making the case study utilizes System Analysis and Scenario Analysis, based upon expert interviews, to assess which forms of ambidexterity found in scientific literature (1) Structural-, (2) Sequential-, or (3) Contextual Ambidexterity, performs best. Most robust policy option in terms of both short and long term criteria, without creating new path dependencies, is found to be Contextual Ambidexterity.