Operational Innovation: From Principles to Methodology

The present research has the objective to discover and understand potential sources of Sustained Competitive Advantage (SCA) for companies and exploit this potential in order to achieve and maintain the competitive advantage through operational innovation and especially through the implementation of IT -dependent strategic initiatives. A new strategic analysis methodology is proposed and described within the paper. The concept of Business Artifact (BA) already introduced and used for business process modeling within the Model Driven Business Transformation (MDBT) framework is the basic element of our methodology. The theoretical foundations of the work are provided by the Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm theory [Barney, J Manage 17(1):99-120, 1991] and by the Critical Success Factors (CSF) method [Rockart, Harv Bus Rev 57(2):81-93, 1979]. Considering that, by definition, each Business Artifact has a data model, in which all the resources it needs and uses during its lifecycle are specified, we want to identify which Business Artifacts are strategically relevant for a company and prioritize them according to the Sustained Competitive Advantage they could be able to provide. These key BAs should then be the target of any IT -dependent strategic initiative, that should include actions aimed at improving or transforming these BAs in order to achieve, maintain and exploit the company competitive advantage.