Editorial: Competitive productivity (CP): advancing the competitiveness paradigm

Competitive productivity (CP) was introduced into the literature by Baumann et al. (2019) to combine the concepts of competitiveness and productivity that were previously treated separately from theory and practice perspectives. CP is defined as follows: “Competitive Productivity is in essence both an attitude and a behaviour directed at outperforming the competition – or at least bettering one's own performance – through pragmatism.” CP indeed constitutes a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 2012) in novel ways to understanding competitiveness and productivity and their relationship. In short, CP is centred around (1) relativity (performance measurement and management in relation to markets' and competitors' performance and each entity's past performance); (2) benchmarking as in “Einstein Marketing proposes Service Philosophy as the driver of a service provider's market offering (i.e. product features and quality, services mix and quality, price), but importantly, our model includes a contextual moderator in that relationship: the market situation” (Baumann et al., 2016a, b, p. 60); (3) “trilogy architecture” (Baumann et al., 2019, p. 120) integrating macro, meso and micro levels as the newly developed M-M-M CP architecture (national competitive productivity (NCP), firm competitive productivity (FCP), individual competitive productivity (ICP) and (4) pragmatism (move away from long, slow and bureaucratic processes towards a pragmatic approach).