strategic management journal

strategic management journal

Exploring the Latest Trends and Developments in Strategic Management

1. Introduction to Strategic Management

According to Borges and Weiber (2015), strategic planning encompasses “an ever-changing repertoire of management techniques, reflecting only the adaptation ability of decision-makers to current competitive conditions which varies as a function of the pervasiveness of their knowledge, the availability of resources to be used and the organizational characteristics”. To ensure this planning’s effectiveness, knowing and applying the urtext strategic search models and concepts is indispensable in the cacophony of contradictory options in the real world.

With the current fast-paced globalization that organizations operate in, initiating and managing strategic planning is a fundamental focal point filled with many challenges among corporate executives. Nevertheless, it is also a competitive advantage as it sets the boundaries of where the company intends to position itself within the market. Strategic planning emerges in the enterprise’s capability to jointly balance its internal and external company’s capabilities and skill, generating economic-financial growth and sustainability protection along with being financially solvent and competitively advantaged.

2. Key Theories and Frameworks in Strategic Management

First popularized in 1980 by Michael Porter in Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, the five forces model remains vital today. Based on the idea that business competes on a level playing field, the model shows that to be successful, an organization must understand and respond to its suppliers, consumers, existing competitors and potential new competitors. The strategic aim is to structure the firm so as to improve its bargaining power in that game. With the internet changing the competitive environment, a heterogeneous pattern of substitution occurs. Strategic groups consist of firms with similar market positioning and resources. Because strategic groups gravitate toward environments favoring their own particular strategies, this ingoing complexity of self-created design choices is a key feature of the strategic management process and a source of its management challenges.

When it comes to business and management research, it’s tough to beat strategic management. Within strategic management, issues essential to business persistently rank among the most promising topics of inquiry. This isn’t surprising. A business that doesn’t know where it wants to go has no chance of arriving intact. Unless a company can define its strategic orientation, it won’t be able to adapt to its own strengths and weaknesses, those of its suppliers, customers and competitors, and manage the impact of the business environment. Selecting and using competencies effectively lies at the heart of enhancing shareholder value. Accordingly, the business sector needs strategic management techniques to avoid drift, ensure its competitive survival and make its members wealthier by creating shareholder value.

3. Emerging Trends and Technologies Impacting Strategic Management

3.1 Technology Vision and Principles This research in technology-driven changes within the strategic management practitioner field focuses on a relatively longer-term timeframe than typical technology research, where timeframes are of necessity short and highly pragmatic. In part, this longer-term bias is natural within strategic management, where planning horizons are typically longer, complex business interdependencies are considered, and benefits realized over a longer timeframe are preferred over easily observed short-term process value. Changing the nature and types of resources managed is a necessary function of business in dynamic environments. Yet, many technology business researchers are focused on a much tighter integration between rapidly changing technology capabilities and strategic management processes, models, and frameworks. The definition of business value from operating models that span push, pull, and hybrid models is undergoing rapid change.

Emerging technologies are profoundly influencing the world of strategic management. Strategic management encompasses an array of intense, foresight-based activities such as scanning the horizon for influential trends, girding against disruptive innovations, exploring new paths to value creation and capturing, assimilating, and acting on such diverse, complex information sources. It is a potentially exciting time for business strategic managers: identifying and leveraging major sustainable technology vectors is a source of significant competitive advantage, and new analytical and enablement tools are being delivered that can provide a dramatic boost to strategic planning, analytics, and execution. This part provides a brief overview of some of the new technologies having an important impact on strategic management, and seeks to explore the ways in which business and technology organizations can capture value and effectively manage the forces of change in a rapidly technologically evolving world, in the face of increasingly short strategic decision cycles.

4. Case Studies and Best Practices in Strategic Management

Science and Strategic Management: The Role of Digital Business Ecosystems The chapter reviews existing research and provides suggestions for strategic management in science and scientific organizations, indicating the direction and the way for overcoming the dichotomy of the present. Most difficult costly and paradoxes manifest in the transition or relation of scientific research to its commercialization.

The Sources of Technological Start-Up in Chemistry The literature has demonstrated that previous experience in the company presents the critical factor for the survival and future progress in technology start-up.

Strategic Market Management for Nonprofit Organizations Today, if non-profit organizations want to accomplish their objectives and fulfill their mission, 100% dependence on help and obligingness of others (other branch non-profit organizations: The National Lottery, the Municipality, the territories owners, etc.) is not enough. In this connection, we propose an original marketing model and its practical realization – “clasterization” of the nonprofit organizations and territorial marketing concepts.

Overview of the Intelligent Behaviour Model in Management and Administration The chapter aims to prove and explain intelligent behavior as the most suitable for business behavior, management, and administration. The goal is to establish on scientific grounds and prove a model of the most intelligent behavior in management and administration. This model will be developed by introducing elements of the modified process approach whereby business, management, and administration will be viewed as processes. Baselines are used, the approved three hierarchical levels possibilities to human existence; the stages in evolution including the relative psychological cycles; the stages of behavior and the possibility already available that in the next phase of social development, controlled human common behavior in a business activity will be acting effectively as a collective brain.

Book chapters in this section focus on strategic management in science and innovation, on the way companies can benefit from external management, on strategic management in non-profit organizations, and on best practices in strategic management. The first chapter reviews existing research and provides suggestions for improving strategic management in science and scientific organizations. The following article, in turn, focuses on the external management of a science-intensive company that has just started its operations, while the next article provides both theoretical and empirical insights into the role of consulting companies in the process of strategy development and an approach that prevents ineffective and inefficient performance. The last chapter presents a new strategic management method for non-profit organizations and illustrates it with a case of a public healthcare provider.