Agility and competitive advantage

Competive advantage is taking your core competence and making from it some key feature that gives you an edge over your competitors. It could be a fast, flexible and low cost supply chain like Dell's; or Toyota's ability to rapidly develop multiple new car designs and to manufacture them almost faultlessly. But what happens when, inevitably, the others catch up? The answers are many, but they include sharpening that edge continually or looking for new ideas from left field. This BusinessWeek article explores a few of those ideas.