Conjecture

Value landscapes move on two timescales. Fast: companies and organisations hill-climb around their competitors, so most strategy is positioning relative to rivals on terrain they take as given. Slow: the underlying value landscape is set by what users value, by what technology makes possible, and by developments in related industries (complements, suppliers and adjacent technologies whose progress changes what any product is worth). It shifts far more slowly in response to any one firm's actions, and mostly in punctuations, often triggered from outside the industry. Firms that read only the fast layer win local races and lose when the slow layer moves; the exceptions are players large or central enough (platforms, standards, collectives) to deform the slow layer themselves.

Capital mechanisms