I disagree with the notion that the world is changing and that this has somehow made our established strategy tools obsolete. Most changes in the business environment have been in degree rather than kind: the speedier diffusion of technology, the growing intensity of competition as a result of internationalization, increased concern over business’s social and environmental responsibilities. Most of the core concepts and frameworks of strategy have not been devalued by change. …
What’s changed is not so much the environment as our empirical and theoretical knowledge about strategy. Our understanding of the experience curve has been augmented by deeper insights into the determinants of organizational learning. Our analysis of competition extends well beyond Porter’s five-forces framework, to recognize the role of complements, network externalities, and platforms. Our understanding of the benefits of strategic flexibility has been transformed by the analysis of real options. A major problem is that the theoretical and empirical research in strategy has moved so quickly, and over such a broad front, that its distillation into intuitive concepts and frameworks applicable to strategy-making processes of firms has lagged far behind.
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