Porter's competitive advantage, revisited

Nearly forty years ago, Professor Edward Mason, then the guru of industrial organization in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard began an experiment. He encouraged his doctoral students to investigate topics that opened up new territory between economics and business, and between economics and law. Mason believed that these topics called for an interdisciplinary approach. He also wanted to accumulate reliable data on the workings of the modern business concern. To do this he asked some of his friends on the business school and law faculties at Harvard to help his students gain access to particular firms and to data on their industries, and also to help them master techniques of analysis and perspectives that had few exponents on his side of the Charles River.