Unpacking the Context of Decision Criteria: Four Types of Enacted and Sustained Competitiveness

We investigate sense-making processes among innovation managers and suggest that the company's boundary with its environment is enacted among individual innovation managers, con- tributing to the literature on portfolio management, competition, and managerial cognition. Specifically, based on a repertory grid analysis of 20 interviews with five resilient businesses, we propose that the enactment is bracketed in terms of goals and methods, with some shared inter- subjectivity and some unshared, resulting in four types of constructed competition. One of the managerial implications is that competitiveness is a complex notion that is more difficult to make an object of management than previously imagined.