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264 CHAPTER 7 • ImPRovEmEnT sTRATEgy
position. We are not suggesting that because a company’s operations have a particular
capability it should always attempt to exploit it in the market. But the deployment
of capability does create potential in the market. How this potential is realised (or
not) and how organisations target market segments is beyond the scope of this book.
However, what is very much important to operations strategy is how the operation can
deploy its capabilities to provide the potential for the organisation to inhabit profit-
able market segments.
Again, we use the idea of a cycle within the overall strategic improvement cycle. This
is illustrated in Figure 7.13. Operations capabilities must provide a contribution to what
the organisation regards as being its range of potential market positions, but how the
operation can contribute to this potential is influenced strongly by the expectations
that the rest of the organisation has for its operations. However, before exploring that
idea, it is worth distinguishing improvement ideas that emerge internally, and those
that are ‘inspired’ by external players.

Deploying external ideas
Most of the literature that deals with improvement focuses on the generation, devel-
opment and deployment of improvement ideas that originated within, rather from
outside, the organisation. Yet to ignore the improvements that other companies are
deploying is to ignore a potentially huge source of innovation. Whether they are com-
petitors, suppliers, customers, or simply other firms with similar challenges, firms in
the wider external business environment can provide solutions to internal problems.
The discussion on benchmarking earlier in this chapter is clearly related to the idea of
finding inspiration from outside the organisation. But some commentators on innova-
tion go further and argue that (legally) ‘copying’ from outsiders can be an effective, if
underused, approach to improvement. In his book, Copycats: How Smart Companies Use
18
Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge, Oded Shenkar claims that although to argue ‘imita-
tion can be strategic seems almost blasphemous in the current scholarly climate’, it can, ‘be
strategic and should be part of the strategic repertoire of any agile firm’. In fact, ‘imitation can
be a differentiating factor and has the potential to deliver unique value’. He cites Apple, mak-
ing the point that the iPod was not the first digital-music player; nor was the iPhone
the first smartphone or the iPad the first tablet. To some extent, Apple imitated ideas
found in others’ products but solved the technical problems, established an appropriate
supply chain operating model and made the products far more appealing. Similarly, Ray

Figure 7.13 Deploying operations capabilities to create market potential means
ensuring that the operations function is expected to contribute to market positioning

Contribution

Operations Market
capabilities DEPLOY potential
Expectations

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