Two very different models of product innovation are postulated and tested. The conservative model assumes that innovation is performed reluctantly, mainly in response to serious challenges. It therefore predicts that innovation will correlate positively with environmental, information processing, structural and decision making variables that represent, or help to recognize and cope with these challenges. In contrast, the entrepreneurial model supposes that innovation is always aggressively pursued and will be very high unless decision makers are warned to slow down. Thus negative correlations are predicted between innovation and the variables that can provide such warning. Correlational and curvilinear regression analyses revealed that each model was supported by conservative and entrepreneurial sub‐samples, respectively, in a diverse sample of 52 Canadian firms.

A review of recent literature on the corporate life cycle disclosed five common stages: birth, growth, maturity, revival, and decline. Theorists predicted that each stage would manifest integral complementarities among variables of environment ("situation"), strategy, structure and decision making methods; that organizational growth and increasing environmental complexity would cause each stage to exhibit certain significant differences from all other stages along these four classes of variables; and that organizations tend to move in a linear progression through the five stages, proceeding sequentially from birth to decline. These contentions were tested by this study. A sample of 161 periods of history from 36 firms were classified into the five life cycle stages using a few attributes deemed central to each. Analyses of variance were performed on 54 variables of strategy, structure, environment and decision making style. The results seemed to support the prevalence of complementarities among variables within each stage and the predicted inter-stage differences. They did not, however, show that organizations went through the stages in the same sequence.organizational life cycle, corporate strategy, evolution of strategy, structure and environment

Whereas much is known about the relationships between strategy and structure, and between environment and structure, too little is known about a third link—the relationship between strategy‐making and environment. An empirical study was conducted upon two distinct samples of firms. We hypothesized that increases in environmental dynamism, hostility and heterogeneity should be related to specific changes in the amount of analysis and innovation which characterizes strategy‐making activity. Most of these relationships tended to be much stronger in successful than in unsuccessful samples of firms.

There have been few attempts to understand the strategy making process by examining the organizational and environmental context in which it occurs. Rather than adopting the stance of contingency theorists who focus mainly on bivariate relationships, we decided to look for simultaneous associations among a fairly large number of variables. It was hoped that these variables would configure into models or archetypes which describe a series of different, though very frequently occurring modes or organizational failure and success. The methodology used to isolate archetypes is explained. Ten archetypes are described. Successful archetypes are: the adaptive firm under moderate challenge, the adaptive firm in a very challenging environment, the dominant firm, the giant under fire, the entrepreneurial conglomerate, and the innovator. Failure archetypes include: the impulsive firm, the stagnant bureaucracy, the headless giant, and the aftermath.

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