Within international business, the diamond model, also known as Porter's Diamond or the Porter Diamond Theory of National Advantage, describes a nation's competitive advantage in the international market. In this model, four attributes are taken into consideration: factor conditions, demand conditions, related and supporting industries, and firm strategy, structure, and rivalry. According to Michael Porter, the model's creator, "These determinants create the national environment in which companies are born and learn how to compete."

Strategic analysis typically focuses on two views of organization: the industry view and the resource-based view (RBV). These views analyse the organisation without taking into consideration relationship between the organizations strategic choice (i.e. Porter generic strategies) and institutional frameworks. The diamond model is a tool for analyzing the organization's task environment. The diamond model highlights that strategic choices should not only be a function of industry structure and a firm's resources, it should also be a function of the constraints of the institutional framework. Institutional analysis (such as the diamond model) becomes increasingly important as firms enter new operating environments and operate within new institutional frameworks.

Porter's National Diamond framework resulted from a study of patterns of comparative advantage among industrialized nations. It works to integrate much of Porter's previous work in his competitive five forces theory, his value chain framework as well as his theory of competitive advantage into a consolidated framework that looks at the sources of competitive advantage sourcable from the national context. It can be used both to analyze a firm's ability to function in a national market, as well as analyse a national market's ability to compete in an international market.

It recognizes four pillars of research (factor conditions, demand conditions, related and supporting industries, firm structure, strategy and rivalry) that one must undertake in analysing the viability of a nation competing in a particular international market, but it also can be used as a comparative analysis tool in recognising which country a particular firm is suited to expanding into.

Two of the aforementioned pillars focus on the (national) macroeconomics environment to determine if the demand is present along with the factors needed for production (i.e. both extreme ends of the value chain). Another pillar focuses on the specific relationships supporting industries have with the particular firm/nation/industry being studied. The last pillar it looks at the firm's strategic response (microeconomics) i.e. its strategy, taking into account the industry structure and rivalry (see five forces). In this way it tries to highlight areas of competitive advantage as well as competitive weakness, by looking at a companies/nations suitability to the particular conditions of a particular market.

The four different components of the framework are:

Factor conditions include the nation's production resources, including infrastructure, labor force, land, and natural resources.

According to Porter, "a nation does not inherit but instead creates the most important factors of production—such as skilled human resources or a scientific base". A lack of less important factors, such as an unskilled labor force or access to raw materials, can be mediated through technology or by implementing what Porter calls "a global strategy."