Business Competitiveness and Sustainability: Theory, Practice, and Future Challenges

This book presents seven internal dimensions that have a direct impact on an organization’s global competitiveness and sustainability: purpose, leadership, passion, people-centered, customer-centric, infrastructure, and viability.

An organization operates as a complex adaptive system that is impacted by external factors that make up its environment. These external factors, in turn, compel managers to make decisions and take deliberate actions that stimulate the organization’s internal dimensions to enhance its competitiveness. Therefore, a competitive organization achieves a sustained level of productivity that leads to growth and the attainment of its objectives, resulting in increased income and well-being. Chapters in this book provide readers with a framework that demonstrates how these dimensions can be studied and analyzed individually, as well as how cultivating a coherent, mutually reinforcing system can enhance an organization’s competitive advantage. This book also includes illustrative case studies and proposes an instrument to measure an organization’s competitiveness.

Providing a strategic framework for enhancing competitiveness in VUCA environments, this book will interest scholars and students in strategic management, competitiveness, innovation and international business.

Marco Arraya is an invited professor at Universidade Europeia (Lisboa), Portugal. He holds a PhD in Strategic Management at Universidade Aberta, Portugal. Marco has co-edited several books and published in international journals, and his research interests include competitiveness, dynamic capabilities, strategic management and organisational change. He has a long experience in competitive industries as CEO.

João J. Ferreira is a Full Professor of Management at the University of Beira Interior (UBI), Portugal and an affiliated member of the UBI Research Unit in Business Sciences (NECE). He has edited or co-edited several books on strategy and entrepreneurship and published over 200 papers in premier international journals. His main research interests include strategy, competitiveness and entrepreneurship.