Strategy-making is usuully portrayed in dichotomous terms: rational vs. incremental, or formulation vs. implementation. It may, however, be more valid to think of organizations as entities capable of developing resources and skills in multiple strategy-making process modes. This paper first develops measures to identify firms with different levels and types of strategy-making process 'capability' then examines empirically their relationships to five dimensions of perceived performance, using data collected from a sample of 285 top managers. Results indicate that firms with high process capability-the simultaneous use of multiple strategy -making process modes-outperfonn single-mode or less process-capable organizations.The competitive realities of the 1990s appear to demand not only efficiency and high quality, but also fast cycle capability (Stalk and Hout, 1990), strategic flexibility (Womack, Jones, and ROOS, 1990), and attention to social-environmental concerns (Schmidheiny ,1992). Increasingly, scholars are recognizing that these objectives can only be achieved through effective strategic processes and organizational capabilities (Senge, 1990;Ulrich and Lake, 1990; Chakravarthy and Doz, 1992). Strategy-making can thus be conceptualized as a key process requiring purposeful design just as product development, production, order fulfillment, or service quality represent critical firm processes (Hammer and Champy, 1993).Unfortunately, most existing strategy-making process models do not fully capture the complexity and variety of the phenomena. Strategy-making is typically portrayed in 'eithedor' t e r m c i t h e r rational or incremental (e.g., Lindblom, 1959;
Incremental product innovation is a critically important competitive factor in established industries. Firms in the cardiac pacemaker industry often benefit by bringing incremental innovations to market even though the new products may cannibalize the sales of existing profitable products. The more often an industry incumbent was among the first to introduce important incremental product innovations the greater its market share in the industry, while adopting innovations that had been introduced by competitors had a small positive relationship with greater market share. The greater the number of competitors that introduced similar products, the greater the market share of firms that were first to market. Greater market share, in turn, reduced the likelihood of business dissolution, while introducing important incremental innovations provided little or no reduction in the likelihood of business dissolution net of the effects of the market share that the firm achieved. The results apply most directly to industries in which buyers incur moderate switching costs.
University faculty are increasingly called on to be less of a sage on the stage and more a guide on the side. This discussion introduces the underlying philosophy and assumptions of active learning theory. With this shift in pedagogical philosophy, there has been an increasing call for tools that actively engage students in the learning process. A game-show format is suggested as an effective classroom tool for active learning. Examples are given that draw on the television shows Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Jeopardy.
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