Richard D'Aveni

Richard A. D'Aveni is an American academic, thought leader, business consultant, bestselling author and the Bakala Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is best known for creating a new paradigm in business strategy and coining the term “hypercompetition” which led Fortune to liken him to a modern version of Sun Tzu. Hypercompetition involves rapid, fierce, and disruptive rivalry in an industry. Such industries cause shorter-term advantages, frenzied maneuvering, and proactive strikes on oligopolistic leaders of the industry. The goal is to undermine long-term advantages such as product positioning, technology and know-how, profitable strongholds, and deep pockets. This is in sharp contrast to other models of business strategy, such as oligopolistic models, which rely on long-term advantages created by the same competitive advantages that hypercompetition seeks to undermine, obsolesce, mute, or neutralize.