Abstract: Since the naissance of strategic management theory, there has been a connotative hypothesis that sustainable competitive advantage does exist. Therefore, how to achieve the sustainable competitive advantage becomes the main focus of studies concerning strategic management theories. However, it seems increasingly difficult for an enterprise to ensure its competitive advantage due to the complexity and uncertainty of the market environment. For the past few years, many studies show that the so-called competitive advantage is usually rare or declines fast, thus it is facing more and more doubts. As a result, many foreign scholars start to explore and study temporary competitive advantage. At present, there are three schools of temporary competitive advantage grounding on action, resource, and performance, respectively in the foreign academic circle.

Key words: sustainable competitive advantage, temporary competitive advantage, research school