Search results

Often businesses fail, or fail to reach their true potential, for strategic rather than operational reasons. This type of failure may be caused because the key decision makers in such firms are not well informed about the strategic landscape in which their firm operates. A military analogy is used to show that successful military campaigns are often predicated upon having accurate maps. Similarly, competitive strategies followed by firms are likely to be more successful if key decision makers possess accurate strategic maps which display the location of their own and rival firms. In other words, those firms which have detailed knowledge of their strategic landscapes are likely to enjoy significant competitive advantage, while firms which are in ignorance of their strategic landscape are less likely to be able to navigate a route that will confer sustained competitive advantage. A firm’s strategic landscape is analysed in terms of: the firm’s true competitive position, the industry conditions under which the firm and its competitors operate and the core strategies that firms in the industry are following. This paper analyses an approach to strategic mapping developed by a major new independent strategic database called CAM (Competitive Analysis Model). This database has been built to aid small firms improve their results through generating accurate strategic maps. These maps enable client firms to assess their strategic locations and performances longitudinally, sectorally and cross‐sectionally. Finally, CAM clients appear to have outperformed similarly structured non‐CAM firms.

With over 2,000 participating firms, CAM‐Benchmarking Ltd (http://www.cam‐benchmarking.com) is one of the world's largest strategy benchmarking databases for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper draws upon CAM data to show that in a geographical region suffering from the deleterious economic effects of peripherality real progress to convergence (in terms of firm performance) can be achieved through benchmarking. More specifically the paper shows that comprehensive benchmarking data can be used to close the information gap that small firms, relative to large firms, often have, and through this process boost individual firm, and hence overall regional, performance.

The economic contribution that small firms make is being increasingly recognised. Consequently robust strategic benchmarks for small firms must be extremely valuable not just for the firms themselves but also for the wider economic community. The Competitive Analysis Model (CAM) is a new approach to the strategic benchmarking of small firms. Currently this model comprises 893 firms on which are held 320 separate data items. These data items are used to provide individual firm reports so that participating firms can benchmark their performance in terms of measures such as: growth rates, internal performance measures, external performance measures and strategic priorities. The benchmarks are provided in two major manners: sectoral comparisons so that a firm can benchmark its performance with others of a similar size in the same industry sub‐sector and cross‐sectional comparisons so that a firm can benchmark its performance with others of similar size irrespective of the industry in which they operate. This article describes the operation of CAM and illustrates its operations through a typical CAM report.