Unlikely champions: how underdogs create strategic advantages

People commonly expect underdogs to lose. However, being highly disadvantaged has potential benefits. This article describes how five French organizational underdogs overcame expectations and became organizational champions. The organizations included both incumbent and new ventures had influential CEOs and pointed to 81 commonalities. The main liabilities of the former were size plus failure, and those of the latter were size plus newness. The study describes a process of ‘internal underdogging,' in which disadvantaged organizations become winners by harnessing their idiosyncrasies and unique resources. This process simultaneously produces a second way of strategizing coined ‘enactizing,' an unconscious process of creating and exploiting misperceptions while enacting a vision. At the theoretical level, this research shows that weakness and vulnerability do not always lead to a dead end. Instead, they can trigger the unexpected development of a singular way to create strategic advantages. At the empirical level, it formalizes a source of inspiration for both current and future intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs. The study focuses on small organizations, but large organizations could benefit from these insights.