Template · Strategy & competition
Porter's Five Forces template
For judging whether an industry can pay you, from the five forces that squeeze its profits, and where you could defend a position. Leave it alone when the question is about one competitor; this analyses the structure, not the rival. Instead 7 Powers, applied to the rival, to see what power they actually hold; Five Forces reads the structure, not the player.
Download it
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Or work it through here
Rate each force for your industry, capture the evidence behind the rating, then read the overall structure. Your entries persist for this browser session and can be copied out as Markdown or printed.
The reading · 0 of 5 forces rated
Rate all five forces and the reading appears here.
What you may do with it
This sheet, meaning our drawing and layout of it, is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Use it commercially, put it in a client deck, print it for a workshop, adapt it. Keep the attribution line that is printed on the sheet and you have met the licence.
Originator: Michael E. Porter. The framework itself is not ours to license, and the written entry behind this page, its worked example, critiques and sources, stays all rights reserved. The full licence position is set out in plain English.
Before you fill it in
A blank template is the easy part. The entry behind it covers how to run Porter's Five Forces properly, a worked example, the pitfalls real teams hit, and the situations where it is the wrong tool and something else would serve better.