Academics also responded to this new approach to strategy in at least four important ways.9 First, scholars such as Anita McGahan extended Porter’s concepts through extensive empirical research that broadly supported Porter’s concepts. 10 Second, a former student of Porter’s, Richard Rumelt, focused strategy away from industry characteristics toward the characteristics of individual firms. He found that the industry-level differences highlighted in the five forces model were actually less predictive of firm profitability than were differences between firms within a single industry.11