Exam 9: Competitive Dynamics

When competition is unusually destructive or industry developments are desired that exceed the capacity of any one company, a ________ response with competitors may be needed.

Tactics are short-term competitive moves and countermoves, as opposed to those that create long-term direction and investments.

Prospectors are usually leaders of change in an industry and quite willing to cannibalize their own products.

Classifying companies as Prospectors, Analyzers, Defenders or Reactors depending on their relative industry positions helps one to predict the likely strategic and tactical moves that companies will make.

There are significant ethical issues to be considered when talking to current or former employees of a competitor, especially when a current employee of a competitor is interviewing at one's company.

This famous technology prediction claimed that the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit would double about every two years.

The tactical responses to competitive moves associated with manipulation, the most active tactical response style, include co-opt, influence, and control.

Competitive responses to strategic threats, in contrast with those for tactical moves, include containment, shaping, and neutralization among others.

Which of the following is one of the characteristics of a benign industry environment?

This type of company is intensive rather than extensive; it usually focuses on a limited number of key criteria, analyzes their costs, and vigorously defends its competitive position against all competitors.

This type of company either has parts that behave like a Defender and parts that behave like a Prospector or is a firm that can switch between those two "personalities" without a significant negative impact on the organization.

Which of the following is a technique, described in the text, for gathering competitive intelligence?

Which of the following is not a method described in the text for gathering competitive intelligence?

Firms that find themselves in situations where their returns are not as they anticipated are more likely to act in unpredictable ways, such as by starting industry-damaging price wars.

Hostile environments seem to be characteristic of industries that are approaching or have reached the maturity stage of the industry life cycle.

This is a company that provides a complete, detailed record of all available public information about any particular organization, area, person or situation.

A Defender carefully attends to a limited number of key criteria, analyzes their costs and vigorously defends its competitive position against all rivals.

A company that tends to view the industry from its own perspective and that of the customer rather than being concerned with the competition is a Reactor.

How do companies respond to threats that are strategic in nature?

A specific tactic associated with the "defy" tactical response style is