Competitiveness is, along with innovation, one of the obsessions of technology companies. To be competitive is to offer products and services that are capable of winning over the competition. But that is not enough, you have to be profitable! This is why competitiveness has a cost dimension (sometimes explicitly called cost-competitiveness or, somewhat erroneously, price-competitiveness because costs and prices are not necessarily correlated) and a value dimension (sometimes called value-competitiveness).

Being competitive means making efforts to reduce costs, of course, but not only; it also means making efforts on the customer value of products and offers.  It is the balance between costs and customer value that defines whether a product or an offer is competitive or not, i.e. whether it is capable of outperforming the competition. Depending on the key success factors identified in a market, some strategies will prioritise cost-competitiveness and price at near-constant value, others will prioritise customer value even if costs and prices are high.

This section explores and illustrates different aspects of competitiveness and cost-value dialogue.