The potential use of 1ST as a competitive weapon
has been of enormous interest to many academic
scholars and practitioners since Porter's (1979)
work on industry analysiS and the formulation of
competitive strategies appeared. Bakos and
Treacy (1986) report that more than 200 papers
were published in the area of 1ST as a competitive
weapon during the 1980s. This literature shares
two common characteristics: (1) proliferation of
"frameworks" for identifying and categorizing opportunities
for the strategiC use of 1ST (Bakos and
Treacy, 1986; Ives and Learmonth, 1984) and (2)
descriptions of success stories using 1ST as a
competitive weapon (Treacy, 1986).
In the first characteristic, as is typical of a new
field of study, this literature abounds with a number
of descriptive frameworks for identifying and
categorizing opportunities