Scholar Article

In 1985, Harvard professor Michael Porter introduced the value chain, a strategy tool that provides a model for ‘‘systematically examining all the activities a firm performs and how they interact’’ (Porter, 1985). The value chain looks at primarily inwardly focused core activities from which companies traditionally derive value. However, business and its functional activities have changed significantly in the last 20 years. Given today’s trends in what drives market valuation of firms, such as the overwhelming importance of intangible assets, a purely inward focus is no longer useful. Successful firms are now replacing

internally focused strategy-development models with alternatives that allow a broader view of the firm as a part of the world around it. If, as Porter describes, competitive advantage ‘‘comes from all of the activities of a firm acting in harmony,’’ then for the value-chain model to be effective for the firm, a full representation of all of the available activities should be included in the model including those activities aimed at creating value through external relationships.

Porter, M. (1998), "Clusters and the new economics of competition", Harvard Business Review, Vol. 76 No.6, pp.77.

http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.ballarat.edu.au/Insight/viewPDF.jsp?Filename=html/Output/Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Pdf/2610340406.pdf

On Portugal’s accession to the European Union in 1986, the country’s retail market embarked on a course of profound changes. These changes have led to the rapid and widespread expansion of hypermarkets and supermarkets throughout the country and to the concomitant decline of small self-service stores, grocery shops and pure food stores, which were formerly the nation’s leading retailers of foodstuffs and other domestic products. This trend induced a political reaction on the part of the grocery proprietors (i.e. small and medium businesses) whose organization, the Portuguese Association of Trade, lobbied...