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Increasing chances of firm survival requires enduring entrepreneurship or the ability to balance competing demands for exploration and exploitation. We developed how acquisitions can provide needed disruption to change a firm’s dominant orientation toward exploration or exploitation or enable a continued focus on a firm’s dominant orientation. The result is a new typology for acquisition integration associated with different pre- and post-acquisition characteristics. For example, a firm with an exploitation orientation faces different integration challenges in acquiring targets with an exploration or exploitation orientation. We also distinguished between human and task integration to enable more nuanced integration decisions that help to reconcile conflicting findings on acquisition integration decisions. Implications for management research and practice were discussed.

Welcome to the seventh volume of Research Methodology in Strategy and Management. The mission of this book series is to provide a forum for critique, commentary, and discussion about key methodology issues in the strategic management field. Strategic management relies on an array of complex methods to understand how firms can attain and sustain competitive advantage. How researchers employ different methods to conduct their research in different research contexts and understand the implications associated with their research choices is fundamental to the methodological rigour and the advancement of strategic management theory.

Yair Aharoni is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Management, Tel-Aviv University. He received his DBA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. His doctoral dissertation – The Foreign Investment Decision Process – was published in a book version and was translated to Spanish and Japanese. He is a Fellow of the International Academy of Management and the Academy of International Business. During his long and distinguished academic career, Aharoni was the Daniel and Grace Ross Professor of International Business and later the Issachar Haimovic Professor of Business Policy – both at Tel Aviv University. He was the Thomas Henry Caroll Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (1978–1979). He was also the J. Paul Stitch Visiting Professor of International Business at Duke University (1987–1995) and the director of CIBER (Center of International Business Education and Research) (1992–1995). He published several dozens books and monographs in Hebrew and in English, more than 100 papers and chapters in books and more than 150 cases. For his academic achievements he was awarded both Landau Prize (2007) and Israel Prize in management science (2010).

The purpose of this paper is to review, integrate and extend the methods for constructing and interpreting a strategic groups map. A strategic groups map is a visualization tool for capturing the essence of the competitive landscape in an industry: extent of competition between and among strategic groups, mobility barriers, available niches, positioning and industry dynamics.

This paper extends Porter’s (1980, pp. 152-155) original prescriptions by reviewing the research on strategic groups in the almost 40 years since Porter’s contribution and by amalgamation of practitioners’ uncodified practices.

The process for constructing a strategic groups map consists of five steps: first, define the industry; second, identify strategic characteristics that distinguish between groups; third, divide firms into groups; forth, select the two main dimensions of the map, and draw the map; and five, interpret the map. Specific instructions are provided for practitioners and academic researchers. Several examples of strategic groups maps illustrate this. Ways to interpret the maps are discussed, followed by limitations and conclusion.

Though the topic of strategic groups has been widely researched since the 1980s, there has been very little done in the area of mapping these groups, leaving scholars of businesses and industries with few directions for constructing strategic groups maps. To fill this gap, a structured process for constructing and interpreting a strategic groups map is provided.