Every decade or so, a wave of technological change arrives with enough force to make business leaders feel that the old frameworks no longer apply — that the rulebook has been shredded and that only the boldest improvisers will survive. In the 1990s it was the internet. In the 2000s, mobile. In the 2010s, platform economics and big data. Today, it is generative AI, and the conversation has never been louder.
And yet, something curious keeps happening. Each time strategists declare the death of classical theory, the frameworks of Michael Porter — his Five Forces, his value chain, his generic competitive strategies — turn out not to be obsolete at all. They turn out to be more necessary than ever. Not because the world has stayed the same, but because Porter’s lens is designed precisely to reveal how structure changes and who benefits when it does.
This article makes a case that is simultaneously contrarian and urgent: that technological evolution does not invalidate Porter’s strategic frameworks — it supercharges them. It argues that to understand how AI, digitisation, and platform economics are redrawing the competitive map, one must return to first principles, interrogate the Five Forces with fresh eyes, and recognise that the value chain itself is being surgically dismantled and reassembled in real time.
This is not an academic exercise. The brands that win the next decade will be those that grasp not just what technology can do, but how it reshapes the structural dynamics of their industries and which sources of advantage it builds, destroys, or transfers.
Part I: Porter’s Framework — A Brief Reckoning
Before we can understand how technology is rewriting strategy, it is worth being precise about what Porter actually argued.
In Competitive Strategy (1980) and Competitive Advantage (1985), Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School offered the field something it had never had before: a rigorous, structural account of why some industries are more profitable than others, and why some firms within those industries consistently outperform their peers. His frameworks were not born of intuition. They were born of industrial organisation economics — the analytical tradition of looking at markets as structured environments, not neutral playing fields.
The Five Forces model held that an industry’s long-run profitability is determined by five competitive forces: the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of buyers, the bargaining power of suppliers, the threat of substitutes, and the intensity of competitive rivalry. These forces collectively determine how the value created in an industry is distributed — whether it accrues to producers, suppliers, buyers, or is competed away entirely.
As Stonehouse and Snowdon observed in their landmark retrospective Competitive Advantage Revisited: Michael Porter on Strategy and Competitiveness (published in Journal of Management Studies and widely indexed in strategic management literature), Porter’s contribution was not merely to provide a checklist of competitive pressures but to transform strategic management from an art into a recognisable academic discipline with empirical rigour — a feat, they noted, that had not been equalled before or since.
The value chain model, introduced in Competitive Advantage, was Porter’s second masterstroke. By decomposing the firm into discrete activities — inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, and service, supported by technology development, human resource management, and firm infrastructure — Porter provided a vocabulary for identifying where in the firm value is created and which activities generate sustainable differentiation. As Porter himself summarised in the book, the competitive advantage of a firm lies not merely in individual activities but in the ways those activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer activities.
His third framework — generic competitive strategies — argued that a firm must choose between cost leadership, differentiation, or focus. The famous warning about being “stuck in the middle” — trying to be all things to all buyers without commitment to either cost or differentiation — remained one of the most cited prescriptions in all of management theory.
These frameworks have endured not because the world is static, but because they ask permanent questions: Who captures value? Who threatens the structure? How does this activity confer advantage?
Part II: Technology as a Structural Force, Not Just an Operational Tool
Here is where the conversation gets genuinely interesting for anyone working at the intersection of marketing, technology, and strategy.
The conventional narrative about technology and business goes something like this: technology is a tool that improves efficiency, speeds up processes, and enables organisations to do more with less. It is, in this view, fundamentally operational. The strategic choices remain unchanged; technology merely executes them better.
This view is dangerously incomplete. Technology — particularly disruptive technology — does not merely optimise existing structures. It rewrites them. It shifts which forces are strong and which are weak. It changes who holds bargaining power. It erects new barriers to entry while demolishing old ones. It creates entirely new categories of substitutes. In short, it changes the Five Forces — and because it changes the Five Forces, it changes the entire strategic logic of entire industries.
Research published in Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations by Erskine, Brooks, DiValent, and Kendal (2022) formalised this observation by developing a structured industry model development process grounded in design science research methodology — a process that explicitly accounts for the role of technological change in reshaping industry models over time. Their work confirmed that any serious industry analysis today must be dynamic: a snapshot of the Five Forces taken in 2015 will often bear little resemblance to the structural reality of the same industry in 2025.
The empirical case is compelling. Consider three industries: music, transportation, and retail banking. Each was structurally transformed by digital technology. Each saw the Five Forces shift dramatically within a single decade. And in each case, the winners were not necessarily those with superior resources at the outset — they were those who understood the new structural logic before anyone else.
Part III: The Five Forces Through a Technological Lens
1. The Threat of New Entrants
Of all the forces, the threat of new entrants is perhaps where technology has had the most disruptive — and counterintuitive — effect. Porter’s original framework identified economies of scale, capital requirements, switching costs, access to distribution channels, and government policy as the primary barriers to entry. For most of the 20th century, these barriers were formidable: industries such as airlines, steel manufacturing, and broadcast media required enormous capital investment and took decades to build distribution infrastructure.
Technology has systematically dismantled many of these barriers, often with stunning speed. Cloud computing effectively eliminated the need for firms to own large-scale IT infrastructure, slashing one of the most significant capital requirements for entering technology-adjacent industries. Open-source AI frameworks reduced the cost of building machine-learning capabilities from tens of millions to near-zero for well-resourced startups. The global app ecosystem provided instant distribution channels that previously required decades to build.
Christensen, McKhann, and Verlinden’s extensive work on disruptive innovation theory — crystallised in Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald’s Disruptive Innovation: An Intellectual History and Directions for Future Research (Journal of Management Studies, 2018) — showed that disruptive entrants characteristically enter at the bottom of markets, targeting non-consumers or overserved segments, and then migrate upmarket as their technology matures. This pattern — which played out in personal computing, online retail, streaming media, and digital photography — represents a structural change in the threat-of-entry force that no incumbent can afford to ignore.
The case of streaming versus physical retail in music is instructive. For decades, the recorded music industry was protected by extraordinarily high barriers to entry: physical manufacturing, distribution relationships with retail chains, radio airplay agreements, and marketing budgets that only the major labels could sustain. Spotify, entering a market with no physical assets and a radically different business model, effectively transformed access rather than ownership into the dominant consumption logic. It did not beat the majors at their own game. It changed the game.
Yet technology also creates new barriers to entry — ones that are in some ways even harder to overcome than the traditional ones. Data network effects, proprietary AI training sets, platform ecosystems, and algorithmic recommendation systems function as formidable moats for incumbents who have achieved scale. A recent analysis from the Mass Tech Leadership Council (2025) noted that in the AI industry specifically, the capital required to train frontier models — exceeding $10 million for a single training run in some cases — creates a structural barrier comparable to the capital intensity of 20th-century industrial manufacturing.
This duality — technology as barrier-destroyer and barrier-creator simultaneously — is the central tension that strategic marketers must navigate. Being on the right side of it requires a clear-eyed diagnosis of where you are in the lifecycle of your industry’s technological transformation.
2. Bargaining Power of Suppliers
Porter’s framework positioned supplier power as a function of supplier concentration, the uniqueness of the inputs supplied, the availability of substitutes for those inputs, and the switching costs a buyer would face if it changed suppliers. In the pre-digital era, the most powerful suppliers were typically those who controlled scarce physical resources: oil, steel, specialised components.
The digital economy has introduced a new category of structural supplier that Porter’s original framework could not have anticipated: the platform infrastructure provider. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have become suppliers to an extraordinary proportion of the global economy. Their combined pricing power, access to customer data, and ability to vertically integrate into adjacent markets create a form of supplier power that is both new in character and structurally pervasive.
Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, in their foundational 1997 paper Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management (Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 18, No. 7) — a paper that has become one of the most cited in the strategy literature — argued that competitive advantage in technology-intensive environments requires firms to develop dynamic capabilities: the ability to sense opportunities and threats, seize them, and continuously transform organisational assets and processes in response. Their framework explicitly recognised that in markets characterised by rapid technological change, static resource positions erode quickly, and the ability to reconfigure is itself a source of advantage.
The implications for supplier power are significant. A firm heavily dependent on a single AI infrastructure provider, a single algorithmic search platform, or a single logistics partner has effectively ceded supplier-facing bargaining power in a way that may not be immediately visible in its financial statements but will be increasingly felt in its strategic options.
3. Bargaining Power of Buyers
In most traditional industries, buyers had limited access to comparative information. Purchasing decisions were made on the basis of brand reputation, relationships, and whatever information sellers chose to provide. This information asymmetry structurally reduced buyer power and allowed sellers to capture a greater share of the value created.
The internet shattered this asymmetry. Price comparison engines, social proof systems, product review aggregators, and, increasingly, AI-powered personal shopping assistants have given buyers access to near-perfect market information at near-zero cost. The implications are profound. In consumer retail, automotive, financial services, and virtually every B2B sector, buyers are more powerful than they have ever been. Switching costs have been compressed. Loyalty is not earned once — it must be earned repeatedly, in every interaction.
Research conducted by Zappi and the American Marketing Association, cited in The Drum in December 2024, found that nearly 70% of marketers and market researchers believe consumer insights are influential in decision-making — yet 75% of new consumer products still fail, primarily because companies are not keeping the consumer embedded in their development processes. This finding reveals an irony: as buyer power increases structurally, many organisations are still behaving as if information asymmetry protects them.
Pangarkar (2024), in a study published in Global Business and Organizational Excellence (Wiley), confirmed that Porter’s framework retains full relevance even in digitised industries, but stressed that its application must be dynamic: competitive pressures must be mapped continuously, not treated as a static snapshot. In digitised markets, the time horizon over which buyer power can shift has collapsed from years to months.
4. The Threat of Substitutes
The threat of substitutes — products or services that perform the same function through different means — is the force that has proven most treacherous for established players in the digital era.
Porter identified substitutes as particularly dangerous when they offer comparable performance at lower cost or when they improve rapidly. Digital technology has produced substitutes with alarming frequency across almost every sector. Streaming for physical media. Fintech for retail banking. Telehealth for in-person consultations. Generative AI for professional knowledge work. In each case, the substitute did not merely offer the same value at lower cost — it often offered a superior experience that redefined what customers expected from the category.
Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory provides a powerful complement to Porter’s substitution framework. As Christensen and Bower (1996) documented, incumbents consistently failed to respond to disruptive substitutes not because they lacked intelligence but because they were rationally optimising for their most profitable existing customers — who, initially, did not want the disruptive product. By the time the disruptive substitute had migrated up-market to serve the mainstream, the incumbent’s window for response had closed.
Ndzabukelwako, Mereko, Sambo, and Thango (2024), in a systematic review of 51 studies published between 2014 and 2024 (Preprints, DOI: 10.20944/preprints202410.0119.v1), found that in competitive sectors including retail and telecommunications, the threat of substitution was among the most influential forces shaping firm performance. Their review highlighted that the growing influence of digital platforms and e-commerce had fundamentally reshaped the substitution landscape for firms in these sectors, reducing the latency between a substitute’s emergence and its mainstream adoption.
In the marketing industry itself, the implications are visceral. AI-generated content threatens traditional creative agencies. Programmatic and AI-driven media buying threatens traditional media planning. Synthetic personalisation threatens research and insight businesses. Each represents a substitution risk that must be assessed not as a theoretical threat but as a live structural force.
5. Competitive Rivalry
The final force — the intensity of competitive rivalry among existing players — is the force most directly and visibly shaped by technological change. When technology lowers costs, reduces differentiation, compresses switching costs, and eliminates information asymmetries simultaneously, rivalry intensifies. Price competition escalates. Margins compress. The basis of competition shifts from physical assets to data, algorithms, and execution speed.
The MIS Quarterly study by Sting, Tarakci, and Recker (2024) — Performance Implications of Digital Disruption in Strategic Competition — drew a critical distinction between firms that pursue digital disruption strategies (using digital resources to rewire their value chain and change the performance expectations of their industry) and firms that adapt to digitisation by integrating digital resources into existing value chains. Their analysis found significant performance divergence between the two groups, with digital disruptors generating structural advantages that adapters struggled to match.
This finding resonates loudly with the experience of the marketing and advertising sector. Agencies that have treated AI as an operational tool for efficiency — automating existing processes — are discovering that competitors who have treated AI as a strategic capability for redefining the client value proposition are operating in a structurally different competitive position. As April Quinn, president of Americas at R/GA, told The Drum in 2025: “The real challenge isn’t just adopting AI; it’s learning how to re-skill, restructure, and use AI to create better, not just cheaper, work.”
Part IV: Technology and the Value Chain — Rewiring the Engine
If the Five Forces analysis describes the structural environment in which a firm competes, the value chain describes the internal architecture through which it creates competitive advantage. And here too, technological evolution is not merely adding efficiency — it is fundamentally changing which activities create value and which do not.
Porter’s value chain framework, as documented in the Semantic Scholar entry for Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, disaggregated firm activities into primary activities (inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales, service) and support activities (procurement, technology development, human resource management, firm infrastructure). The key insight was that competitive advantage lies not in any single activity but in the configuration of activities and the linkages between them.
Digital technology has attacked the value chain from multiple directions simultaneously.
First, it has commoditised many traditional primary activities. Inbound and outbound logistics have been automated. Operations — particularly in services — have been algorithmically optimised. The cost of marketing and sales has been compressed by digital channels. The result, as McKinsey argued in its Rewired framework (2023), is that competitive advantage increasingly resides in the support activities — particularly technology development and data infrastructure — rather than in the primary activities that historically differentiated firms.
Second, digital technology has enabled radical reconfiguration of value chains in ways that were structurally impossible before. Airbnb reconfigured the hospitality value chain by eliminating the ownership of physical assets entirely. Uber reconfigured the transportation value chain by shifting capital intensity to the supply side. Amazon reconfigured retail by building logistics infrastructure that allowed it to offer next-day or same-day delivery at scale — a support activity that became its most formidable competitive asset.
Third, and perhaps most importantly for strategists, technology has enabled the emergence of ecosystems as a unit of competitive analysis that Porter’s original framework did not anticipate. In platform-mediated markets, the value chain is not a linear sequence of activities within a single firm but a web of interdependent relationships across multiple firms. The competitive advantage of a platform like Apple’s App Store or Google’s advertising ecosystem lies not in any individual activity but in the network effects that make the ecosystem increasingly valuable as it grows.
Teece’s dynamic capabilities framework — specifically the triad of sensing, seizing, and transforming (Teece, 2018) — provides the theoretical bridge between Porter’s static value chain and the dynamic reality of technology-intensive competition. Firms that sense technological shifts before competitors, seize the opportunity to reconfigure their value chains accordingly, and continuously transform their asset base in response to changing conditions are the ones that sustain competitive advantage over time.
Part V: Generic Strategies in the Age of AI — Are They Still Relevant?
Porter’s three generic strategies — cost leadership, differentiation, and focus — have attracted perhaps the most scepticism in the digital era. Critics argue that AI and platform economics have created “superstar” firms that simultaneously achieve lowest cost and highest differentiation, making the “stuck in the middle” warning obsolete.
This critique is partially correct, but it is a misreading of Porter’s original logic. Porter never argued that cost leadership and differentiation were permanently incompatible — he argued that the strategic activities required to achieve each were often in tension, and that firms that tried to pursue both without a deliberate strategic architecture would achieve neither. The superstar tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — are not exceptions to this rule. They have each made deliberate architectural choices that allow them to achieve differentiation and scale simultaneously: Amazon through its logistics infrastructure and AWS cross-subsidisation; Apple through its tightly integrated hardware-software ecosystem; Microsoft through enterprise relationships that create switching costs at institutional scale.
For most firms competing in most industries, the generic strategy framework remains as valid as ever — but the content of each strategy has been transformed by technology.
Cost leadership in the age of AI means building the data infrastructure and algorithmic capabilities that allow continuous, real-time optimisation of cost structures across the entire value chain. It is not a one-time engineering achievement. It is a dynamic organisational capability.
Differentiation in the age of AI means creating experiences so personalised, so contextually intelligent, and so deeply integrated into a customer’s workflow or life that switching becomes psychologically and practically costly. As Tom Greenhalgh of Google noted at The Drum Live, AI — when fed with high-quality first-party data — can help organisations understand customer behaviours faster than ever before. That understanding, translated into consistently superior experiences, is what differentiation looks like in the digital age.
Focus strategy, meanwhile, has been given new vitality by the precision of digital targeting. The ability to identify, reach, and serve a specific customer segment with extraordinary accuracy — and to build network effects and brand resonance within that segment — creates structural advantages that broad-based competitors find difficult to replicate.
Part VI: The Literature Review — What Research Actually Tells Us
The academic literature on technology and strategic frameworks has grown substantially in the past decade. A coherent picture emerges from a synthesis of the most significant contributions.
Porter’s Enduring Relevance
The foundational empirical question — whether Porter’s frameworks remain analytically useful in digitised industries — has been addressed by several systematic reviews. Pangarkar (2024), in Global Business and Organizational Excellence, concluded that while the framework requires dynamic application rather than static point-in-time analysis, it retains its relevance, particularly in industries with moderate to low disruption velocity. He noted, drawing on Brandenburger (2002) and Isabelle et al. (2020), that assertions about the framework’s irrelevance were overstated, and that entrepreneurs continued to find it practically valuable.
Ndzabukelwako et al. (2024) synthesised 51 studies across a decade of research and confirmed that industry rivalry and buyer bargaining power were the dominant forces shaping SME performance in competitive digitised sectors. Their systematic review highlighted an important gap: the growing influence of digital platforms and e-commerce on competitive forces had not been adequately integrated into mainstream applications of the framework.
Dynamic Capabilities as the Bridge
The theoretical bridge between Porter’s structural analysis and the realities of rapid technological change is provided most powerfully by Teece, Pisano, and Shuen (1997) and the subsequent dynamic capabilities literature. Their argument — that winners in markets of rapid technological change are characterised by timely responsiveness, rapid product innovation, and the management capability to coordinate and redeploy internal and external competences — has been repeatedly confirmed empirically.
Teece’s (2018) refinement of the framework, distinguishing between sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities, has proven particularly valuable for understanding how firms navigate technological disruption. Research published in the European Journal of Innovation Management (2024) applied this tripartite framework to the extended reality industry and found that sensing capabilities were particularly important in uncertain technological environments — enabling firms to prototype and respond quickly — while transforming capabilities determined whether short-term responses translated into durable structural positions.
Digital Disruption and Performance
Sting, Tarakci, and Recker’s MIS Quarterly paper (2024) provided some of the most rigorous quantitative evidence of what we might call the “strategic technology gap.” Their research distinguished firms using digital resources to rewire their value chain from those merely adding digital capabilities to existing chains. The performance divergence between these groups was substantial, suggesting that strategic intent — not technology investment volume — determines competitive outcomes.
This finding echoes McKinsey’s consistent argument, most recently crystallised in Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI (2023), that competitive advantage in the AI era comes not from deploying technology but from building the organisational architecture — cross-functional teams, shared objectives, continuous deployment capabilities — that allows technology to generate sustained advantage at scale.
Disruptive Innovation and Industry Structure
Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory, revisited in the intellectual history paper by Christensen, McKhann, and Verlinden in the Journal of Management Studies (2018), remains the most powerful explanation for why incumbent firms consistently underestimate disruptive threats. The core mechanism — that incumbents rationally prioritise their most profitable customers while ignoring emerging entrants targeting overlooked segments — produces systematic blind spots that only deliberate structural change in how firms allocate attention and resources can correct.
The practical implication is important: the Five Forces analysis must be conducted not just at the level of current industry structure but at the level of emergent structure — the structural configuration that will exist when current technological trends have played out to their logical conclusions. This requires scenario planning as a complement to structural analysis.
Hinterhuber and Nilles (2021): The Holy Grail Question
In Digital Transformation, the Holy Grail and the Disruption of Business Models, Hinterhuber and Nilles directly addressed Porter’s own (initially controversial) assertion that the internet rarely nullifies important sources of competitive advantage in an industry, but instead makes existing advantages more valuable when applied correctly. Their analysis, informed by cases of successful digital transformation, confirmed that the firms best positioned to benefit from technological change were those with strong existing capabilities in branding, customer relationships, and operational excellence — capabilities that digital technology amplified rather than replaced.
Part VII: Practical Implications — What Strategists and Marketers Must Do Differently
The synthesis of this research leads to a set of practical implications that are directly actionable for anyone responsible for brand strategy, marketing investment, or commercial leadership.
1. Diagnose the forces dynamically, not statically. A Five Forces analysis conducted three years ago is not merely dated — it may be actively misleading. In fast-moving sectors, the structural configuration of competitive forces can shift dramatically within 18 months. Build a capability for continuous industry structure monitoring, and treat changes in the forces as early warning signals for strategic repositioning.
2. Map your value chain against emerging technologies. Conduct an honest audit of which activities in your value chain are likely to be commoditised by AI, which can be enhanced, and which represent durable sources of differentiation. Be especially honest about activities that feel important but are structurally substitutable. First-party data, proprietary audience relationships, and creative excellence are the activities that technology currently amplifies. Manual processes, information asymmetries, and analogue distribution are the activities it typically eliminates.
3. Choose a strategic position and architect it deliberately. The warning against being “stuck in the middle” has never been more relevant. In markets where AI compresses the cost of execution across every category, the firms that will prosper are those with a clear strategic identity: either a genuine cost leadership position built on technology-enabled efficiency, or a genuine differentiation position built on experiences, insights, and brand relationships that technology alone cannot replicate.
4. Invest in dynamic capabilities, not just technology capabilities. Bain’s 2024 technology report documented that four of the five most valuable technology companies in 2024 were also in the top five in 2019 — a durability that contradicts the narrative of perpetual disruption. The explanation is that these firms have built dynamic capabilities — the ability to sense shifts, seize opportunities, and continuously transform — that allow them to retain leadership across successive waves of technological change. For challenger firms, the lesson is not to bet on a single technological discontinuity but to build the organisational muscle to navigate multiple discontinuities over time.
5. Treat supplier and buyer power as live board-level concerns. Dependence on algorithmic platforms for distribution, AI infrastructure for capability, and social networks for brand reach represents a structural shift in supplier power that most organisations have not fully internalised. Diversification of technological dependencies — building first-party capabilities that reduce reliance on intermediaries — is not a technical project. It is a strategic priority.
Conclusion: Porter Didn’t Need Updating — He Needed Accelerating
The debate about whether Porter’s frameworks are still relevant in the age of AI has produced more heat than light. The answer, when one looks carefully at both the academic evidence and the competitive realities of the current moment, is clear: the frameworks are not merely relevant — they are indispensable.
What has changed is not the logic of the frameworks but the velocity and volatility with which the forces they describe now move. Industries that once took decades to structurally transform now transform in years. Competitive advantages that once endured for a decade now endure for months. The barriers that technology creates — data moats, platform lock-in, algorithmic recommendation systems — are in some ways more formidable than anything Porter’s original analysis anticipated.
The brands and organisations that will succeed are not those that abandon strategic frameworks in favour of technological agility alone. They are those that combine the structural clarity of Porter’s analysis with the dynamic responsiveness described by Teece and the disruptive imagination celebrated by Christensen. They are organisations that ask, with systematic rigour: what is the current structure of our industry? How is technology changing each force? What does that mean for our value chain and our competitive position? And what must we be able to sense, seize, and transform — and how quickly?
At The Drum’s Predictions Festival 2024, Biren Kalaria of Google reminded marketers that while technological shifts are disruptive, they echo previous industry evolutions: mobile, digital, and now AI. Each wave, he argued, rewards those who understand its structural logic — not just its novelty.
That is, in essence, a Porterian argument. And it remains the right one.
Literature Review — Key Academic References
- Christensen, C.M., McKhann, R., and Verlinden, M. (2018). Disruptive Innovation: An Intellectual History and Directions for Future Research. Journal of Management Studies, 55(7). DOI: 10.1111/joms.12349.
- Erskine, M.A., Brooks, S.L., DiValent, C., and Kendal, T. (2022). Structured Industry Model Development Process Based on Design Science Research Methodology. Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations, 20(1).
- Hinterhuber, A., and Nilles, M. (2021). Digital Transformation, the Holy Grail and the Disruption of Business Models. International Journal of Innovation Management, 25(5). DOI: 10.1142/S1363919621400089.
- Ndzabukelwako, Z., Mereko, O., Sambo, T., and Thango, B. (2024). The Impact of Porter’s Five Forces Model on SMEs Performance: A Systematic Review. Preprints. DOI: 10.20944/preprints202410.0119.v1.
- Pangarkar, N. (2024). Using Porter’s Five Forces Analysis to Drive Strategy. Global Business and Organizational Excellence. DOI: 10.1002/joe.22250.
- Porter, M.E. (1980). Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. New York: Free Press.
- Porter, M.E. (1985). Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: Free Press.
- Sting, F.J., Tarakci, M., and Recker, J. (2024). Performance Implications of Digital Disruption in Strategic Competition. MIS Quarterly, 48(3): 1263–1278. DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2024/17999.
- Stonehouse, G., and Snowdon, B. Competitive Advantage Revisited: Michael Porter on Strategy and Competitiveness. Journal of Management Inquiry. [Indexed in Semantic Scholar, Paper ID: 6419b5fd1bb066bb927c7f2682a10ec3f4fc9f61]
- Teece, D.J., Pisano, G., and Shuen, A. (1997). Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management. Strategic Management Journal, 18(7): 509–533.
- Teece, D.J. (2018). Profiting from Innovation in the Digital Economy: Enabling Technologies, Standards, and Licensing Models in the Wireless World. Research Policy.
Press References
- The Drum (2024). From AI to ROI: Lessons from 2024 that will set marketers up for success in 2025. thedrum.com, December 19, 2024.
- The Drum (2025). Revolution or ‘Smokescreen for Survival’? Marketers on AI and the future of agencies. thedrum.com, 2025.
- The Drum (2025). Balancing AI and fundamentals: how CMOs are transforming their organizations in 2025. thedrum.com, March 20, 2025.
- McKinsey & Company (2024). A Generative AI Reset: Rewiring to Turn Potential into Value in 2024. mckinsey.com, March 4, 2024.
- Bain & Company (2024). How Tech Leaders Commercialize Innovation. bain.com, 2024 Technology Report.
- Mass Tech Leadership Council (2025). Revising Porter’s Five Forces Analysis in the Age of AI. mtlc.co, March 10, 2025.
