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How to Innovate When Nothing is Defensible Anymore

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Previously on Open Road Ventures: in the last episode of Venturing Insights, we explored The Corporate Venturing Matrix 2.0 by Frederic Pampus. If you missed it, you can catch up here! For decades, strategy revolved around defensibility. Companies were encouraged to build “moats”—technological, legal, operational, brand-related—that would make them hard to copy and easy to scale. Moats were strategy’s favorite metaphor. Michael Porter gave us the barriers to entry. Warren Buffett spoke of economic moats. Business schools taught us how to protect advantage, not just gain it. That logic still matters, but it’s no longer enough. In a world shaped by AI, rapid replication, and flattened access to knowledge, the traditional sources of advantage have lost much of their defensive power. Differentiation still helps, but it doesn’t hold. Scarcity exists, but only briefly. Protection is porous. Two recent posts made me reflect on this shift: “Platforms, AI, and the Economics of Big Tech” and “No

Previously on Open Road Ventures: in the last episode of Venturing Insights, we explored The Corporate Venturing Matrix 2.0 by Frederic Pampus. If you missed it, you can catch up here! For decades, strategy revolved around defensibility. Companies were encouraged to build “moats”—technological, legal, operational, brand-related—that would make them hard to copy and easy to scale. Moats were strategy’s favorite metaphor. Michael Porter gave us the barriers to entry. Warren Buffett spoke of economic moats. Business schools taught us how to protect advantage, not just gain it. That logic…

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