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Companies Need a New Approach to Investing This Election Year

Harvard Business Review

Election years are the time to pursue projects that entail minimal commitments and expenditures but will produce tremendous first-mover advantage and large payoffs if post-election policy turns out to be favorable. This year, however, is different.

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For CVS, Social Good Was Not a Factor

The Idolbuster

First mover advantage by proactively stopping tobacco sales before they need to. Healthcare providers don’t sell products that kill people. The ACA has provided a bolus of people who will need additional health care, and CVS is beginning to provide medical services right in their stores.

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Strategy in a World of Constant Change

Harvard Business Review

In it, he talked about the competitive advantage of Southwest Airlines, Vanguard Group and Progressive Insurance. To be sure, first mover advantages can vaporize quickly, but not all first mover advantages are backed by a real competitive advantage.

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Why Winner-Takes-All Thinking Doesn’t Apply to Silicon Valley

Harvard Business Review

Despite having won the desktop with the introduction of Windows in 1985, and having the first mover advantage of introducing a mobile operating system several years before Apple or Google, Microsoft has lost the battle for mobile. That is a very short run compared to the great network industries of yore.

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Why We Shouldn’t Worry About the Declining Number of Public Companies

Harvard Business Review

Such acquisitions become more lucrative with rising first-mover advantages, pace of technological development, and network externality. Consider Yahoo and Whatsapp, which were acquired by Verizon and Facebook, respectively, in multi-billion-dollar deals.

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Microsoft’s Bid to Make Outlook More than Email

Harvard Business Review

The good news for Microsoft is that it has a first-mover advantage, and can evaluate its platform partnerships to decide which third parties should be acquired, which should be exclusively available on Outlook, and which should be more tightly integrated.

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When to Change a Winning Strategy

Harvard Business Review

Its story starts like many success stories do: An innovative concept coupled with a first-mover advantage, enabling a rapid physical expansion and generating increasing returns to scale. To succeed, therefore, managers have to learn when and how to abandon the strategies they have grown up with.