Strategic thinking | EPFL Graph Search

Strategic thinking is a mental or thinking process applied by an individual in the context of achieving a goal or set of goals. As a cognitive activity, it produces thought. When applied in an organizational strategic management process, strategic thinking involves the generation and application of unique business insights and opportunities intended to create competitive advantage for a firm or organization. It can be done individually, as well as collaboratively among key people who can positively alter an organization's future. Group strategic thinking may create more value by enabling a proactive and creative dialogue, where individuals gain other people's perspectives on critical and complex issues. This is regarded as a benefit in highly competitive and fast-changing business landscapes. Overview There is a generally accepted definition for strategic thinking, a common agreeme

Critical Success Factors to Collaborate in Cross Border Alliances: Experiences of Indian Manufacturing Enterprises

Myrna Fatima Flores Pineda

Tracking recent milestones in the ideas that constitute organizational strategy helps to archive strategy thinking, and to get us closer to strategic choice. It is also understood that strategy thinking and social reality interact mutually, and this interaction is central to the emergence of new ideas. Some of these recent emergent ideas of strategy that survive through use can be viewed as milestones. Four broad milestones have been identified through the papers and cases here-emergent missions, emergent forms, emergent resources, and geographic locus.

Norosa2010

Exploration and Resource Commitments in Unequal Partnerships: An Examination of Corporate Venture Capital Investments

Anu Wadhwa

While established firms' relationships with external ventures may have significant strategic benefits, the realization of such benefits is fraught with considerable uncertainty. The real options and interorganizational learning literatures present an interesting trade-off for established firms regarding commitment of resources in a partnership. This study seeks to enhance our understanding of how firms manage these trade-offs when committing resources to external venturing initiatives. We examine the magnitude of resources initially committed by an established firm to an external venturing partnership in the context of corporate venture capital (CVC) investments. While a real options approach suggests that resource commitments should be lowered in the presence of uncertainty regarding realization of benefits, the interorganizational literature emphasizes that resource commitments may be essential for building quality relationships that expedite learning. Corporate investors, who invest in new ventures in order to gain strategic benefits, face higher uncertainty when their investment objectives involve greater exploration. However, greater exploration also increases investors' need to learn from their portfolio ventures. We, therefore, predicted that the degree of exploration would have a U-shaped relationship with the investor's resource commitment in a venture. We also expected that factors that serve to decrease the investor's uncertainty, i.e., investor experience diversity and venture affiliation to prominent venture capitalists, would moderate the U-shaped relationship between exploration and resource commitment. The predictions of the study are tested on a sample of 248 initial investments in private ventures made by incumbent firms in the computer, semiconductor, and telecommunications industries between 1996 and 2000. We find some support for our hypotheses. This study contributes to the external venturing literature on CVC investments by examining the determinants of the magnitude of resource commitment to new ventures, and integrates real options perspective, which advocates low resource commitments under uncertainty, with the organizational learning literature, which argues for greater resource commitment to secure partner cooperation. The results of this study reveal interesting insights into how CVC investors manage individual investments to generate strategic benefits.

Wiley-Blackwell2013

Trust, integrated information technology and new product success

Christopher Tucci

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the combined roles via trust relationships of the two technology cores of the firm: information technology (IT) and R& D and their impact on new product success. Design/methodology/approach - A model was tested whereby trust and the integrated IT strategy account for a significant amount of the variance in a broad range of new product development (NPD) outcomes for a survey sample of 223 manufacturing firms. Respondents said design practices and quality methods like Six Sigma accounted for a total of over 25 percent of the reports of themost helpful approaches in promoting effective NPD. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success. Findings - Respondents reported that a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective included these quality methods. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success. High-tech firms were less likely to report integrated IT strategies, but this tended to be counterbalanced by high levels of trust in the IT function and adoption of organizational innovations for execution of strategic intent. Implications for future research and practice are discussed. Research limitations/implications - Survey methods produce broad results with low response rates in most studies involving R& D and NPD, and this study is no exception. Practical implications - With the challenge of strategy alignment reported by many of these firms, it seems clear that the top management team cannot afford to leave NPD challenges to engineering teams and NPD programs without guidance and general vision. Social implications - NPD has become the staple of most manufacturing firms as a way of meeting and beating the competition worldwide. However, trust between functional areas often starts before people are even employed and should begin in training and educational programs. Originality/value - Designing NPD programs is at the heart of many firms' competitive strategies and the fast learning companies are the winners. Very little is known about the trust relationship between IT and R& D and their combined effects on new product success which we have found to be significant and unexpected in their impacts.