THE COMPETIVIVE ADVANTAGE OF NATIONS: ITS NOT ABOUT CLUSTERS, ITS ABOUT NODES
By Joe Haslam H
ave you ever wondered what a billion dollars of consulting looks like? Well go on over to the web site for the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School and follow the link to National Competitiveness. There you will find a full list of country presentations and other resources on why some companies have a superior economic performance to others. Please do not go here if there is something pressing you need to complete, for as Virgil once wrote, facilis descensus averno. To the idle mind is there anything as fascinating as a Profile of the Icelandic Geothermal Cluster or The Wind Turbine Cluster in Inner Mongolia. This is rigorous, intellectual and high priced analysis but its also exhausting and overwhelming. You may learn a lot, but you also may realise how little you actually know.
So who is behind all this anyway and should we be greatful? The name I may need to introduce you to is that of Michael E. Porter, a HBS Professor described by Philip Delves Broughton in his account of doing a Harvard MBA as “the nearest thing management theory has to a rock star”. It is greatly to his credit that he makes this information available. I´m doubt very much, for instance, that the work Tony Blair Associates are doing in Kuwait and Kazakhstan will be published for all to see. Furthermore, there is quite an amount of substance behind the models he uses to derive his findings. We are very far from the Thomas Friedman model of social science, which Matt Taibbi memorably described as “mainly lunching, reading road signs, and watching people board airplanes”.
Joe Haslam is originally from Ireland but now lives in Madrid. He is a Vice President at Stratemic Capital a boutique VC firm specialising is Disruptive Innovation investments. He is also a Professor in the IE Business School International Centre for Entrepreneurial Management and a Mentor in the IE Venture Lab.
www.ie.edu
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