Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: We often talk about undertaking an initiative in order to create “competitive advantage”, but what does that really mean? What are things you can, and should be doing? Here we examine, the five sources of durable competitive advantage. E-mail. Tweet.

There have been some pithy posts (for example here, and here written on creating durable, or sustainable, competitive advantage; however, the best I’ve ever seen was buried deep in the footnotes of a deck by Khosla Ventures.

In this deck it outlines five major sources of durable competitive advantage:

1. “Special Access” to Scarce Supply
2. High Switching Costs
3. Fixed Cost Leverage
4. Real-Time Business Process Advantage
5. Ownable Network Effect

While the footnotes of the deck don’t go into much more detail, I’ll do my best to provide some explanation, and practical examples, on each of these.

Click here to learn more about each of these factors

Summary: RIM needs a stronger consumer play, or a new mobile killer app, if it’s going to be relevant this decade.E-mail. Tweet.

Being back in Canada for the holidays, has me a little nostalgic – recalling my days at Waterloo, and since watching the meteoric rise of RIM in the past decade, along with Nortel’s precipitous fall from grace. Watching the new wave of mobile devices (formerly known as “smartphones”) and related consumer behavior patterns emerge, it got me thinking about what lies in store for RIM in this upcoming decade, and I’ve come to the realization that RIM may be on it’s way to become this new decade’s Canadian poster child as a high-tech also-ran.
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