Rethinking Skinner’s model: strategic trade-offs in products and services

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to further clarify the link between the theoretical and practical/real-life implications of a seminal topic in the strategic operations management field: Wickham Skinner’s strategic trade-offs model. This will help researchers, practitioners and students to realize the “everyday life” consequences of this highly influential model. Design/methodology/approach: A theoretical analysis is made of previous research dealing with the strategic trade-offs model. Building on these investigations, a Popperian approach is used to logically develop the model, and the authors demonstrate how it can be empirically tested. Findings: Previous investigations on Skinner’s model mainly focus on trade-offs between competitive capabilities (e.g. cost, quality, delivery) at the firm level. This paper demonstrates that the implications of this model necessarily should include consideration of the strategic trade-offs between the competitive characteristics of products/services that practitioners, students and the general public can observe. Originality/value: While previous investigations have provided necessary clarifications, no paper has addressed the issue of the existence of strategic trade-offs between the competitive characteristics of products/services. This paper offers guidelines for researchers and practitioners on the way that the strategic trade-offs model can be conceptualized, understood and tested.