On the Choice and Success of Competitive Strategies

It is a central claim of the national competitiveness literature that firms exploit the comparative advantages of their environment by choosing to pursue that product market strategy which is facilitated by national financial and labour market institutions. Otherwise, so the further argument of the literature goes, firms are punished in that institutionally unsupported strategies are less successful and therefore not sustainable in the long run. My analyses of pharmaceutical firms in Germany, Italy and the UK challenge these arguments on the choice and success of competitive strategies. Given that different measures of strategy success do not indicate that the latter is in line with national institutional advantages, I develop an alternative explanation for the strategy choices of firms. Based on qualitative interviews with managers, I argue that technological opportunities to transform inventions or imitations into marketable products are of major concern when entrepreneurs choose their firms’ strategy.