ABSTRACT
During the latter stages of the Industrial Revolution, some major companies achieved a leadership position by moving before their competitors to exploit emerging or changing customer needs. In the USA during the nineteenth century, for example, Sears Roebuck created their mail order catalogue business in response to the growing demand for domestic goods from immigrants settling in new lands west of the Mississippi (Moon 2005). Then as the rate of urbanization began to accelerate, the company began to open a chain of department stores which eventually spanned the entire country. A similar proactive strategy of exploiting demand was illustrated by Henry Ford when he recognized the market potential which existed for an affordable automobile. This led to the creation of the mass production manufacturing philosophy used to produce his revolutionary Model T motor car (Raff 1991).
