How to create sustainable competiveness through resilience and innovation: A practical model based on an integrated approach

Abstract

The increasing sophistication of clients and the aggressively way how markets permanently act, introduce in organizations a constant need to change. The pressure to reduce decision time cycles and to be able to react and anticipate competitors is a requisite to survive and the key for success. Therefore, it is necessary to reviewexistingmodels of competitiveness and to create newapproaches that integrate new concepts and trends. This paper provides amodel for the creation of competitive advantage that integrates the principles of sustainability (triple bottom line) and the concepts of resilience and innovation. It aims to contribute to the improvement of the strategic planning process of organizations, providing an alternative approach which also combines business evaluation models (such as EFQM and Shingo), with tools that reduce the strategic execution gap (for example Balanced Scorecard). Differentiated criteria for the evaluation of the current competitive positioning of organizations are established, parameters for implementing sustainable competitiveness factors are set and methods for monitoring and feedback proposed. In addition, this research establish a relation between resilience, innovation and sustainable competitiveness, and reveals that this approach is differentiating, able to add value (more focused and more efficient), and applicable to several business sectors and to different levels of technological sophistication, monitoring maturity, as well as adaptable to distinctive cultural environments.