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The purpose of this paper is to present a new and comprehensive business strategy matrix which can be used to create competitive advantage for the value chain of every business unit of any firm.

This paper reviews the key findings of several well-known papers within the value chain literature and then adds several new conceptual insights to step by step create a logically developed, business strategy matrix featuring four strategy choices.

This paper presents the four business strategy choices of competitive value chains, based on the business strategies of innovative quality, lean cost, agile delivery and attentive service.

A future research implication of this paper is to empirically test the financial benefits for producers of custom products, of applying agile delivery as a key business strategy.

This paper provides the senior management of each business unit of any firm, with a clear guide to defining an optimal business strategy.

This paper is intended to advance the practice of business strategy by senior management, to enhance customer value across all business units.

This paper expands upon existing business strategy models by providing a comprehensive business strategy matrix, which can be applied to all possible business units. It does this by building upon current best practice to demonstrate that next to innovative quality, lean cost and attentive service strategies, an agile delivery strategy is required in the case of custom products.

Successful companies make their talent strategy part of their strategic planning process and integrate it into daily operations. They strive for the alignment of their talent with the organization’s vision, goals and business strategy. When combined with the alignment of the tools and systems used by employees, these organizations are positioned to effectively compete and win in the marketplace. However, positioning your organization for success is one thing, while making it happen is quite another.

Discusses a quality assurance approach to environmental management with reference to case material from Lucas Rists Wiring Systems. Concludes that an environmental management system should be relatively easy to implement in an organisation with a solid strategy foundation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and justify a theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between manufacturing strategy, business strategy, time-based manufacturing competence, capability and competitiveness and their impact on firm performance for firms operating in the manufacturing sector. Many executives and scholars have argued that time is an important component for developing a brilliant strategy to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage for the firm.

This paper provides a theoretical framework primarily concerned with the relationship between time-based manufacturing competence, competitive priorities and firm performance. The framework suggests that firms focusing on time as a strategic factor at both strategic levels – business strategy and manufacturing strategy – can achieve a multi-competitive advantage, and, in turn, high performance.

To realize the level of performance associated with time-based manufacturing competence, it is essential for firms to identify the areas in which time can be reduced. These include reduction in design lead time, product concept to production; time-based competition for product-to-market firms; time-based manufacturing competence; product development activities; fast-to-product; and customer service.

This article provides a theoretical framework for linking manufacturing strategy to business strategy and performance to help expand the body of knowledge for other researchers to follow.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Six Sigma and business strategy. The Six Sigma approach requires managers to examine processes from the customers' perspective, thus ensuring long‐term success.

This study reviews the literature on the relationship between Six Sigma and business strategy, and examines how integrating business strategy with Six Sigma improvement action planning can produce competitive advantages. Moreover, a preliminary exploratory framework for linking Six Sigma to business strategy is presented, based on an empirical study of a Taiwan firm.

Six Sigma implementations must be integrated with a company's business strategy. Six Sigma is a structured and disciplined way of solving critical business problems that cannot be addressed using other methods.

The linking of Six Sigma and business strategy framework is an advanced and coherent form of strategic thinking, which extends a strategic vision throughout all units of an organization and to meet core customer requirements.

The paper shows that, as a strategic‐oriented initiative, the context of Six Sigma activities must be adapted and modified to fit a firm's organizational strategy, Consequently, Six Sigma is central to the strategic drive of a company.

The growing literature on business models has so far had limited impact on research in strategy. The main reason for this is the fact that the intellectual territory of the business model construct overlaps significantly with that of strategy. Without acknowledging this overlap, academics doing research on business models run the risk of asking questions that have already been explored in the strategy literature. This implies that research on business models can only become more impactful if we first identify explicitly what is different between the business model and strategy concepts and then focus our research questions on that difference.

The constructs of re-deployment and co-deployment have been central to discussions of scope economies in diversified firms. We argue however that these constructs are also significant in the context of single-business firms. Increasingly, changes in technology and demand preferences have provided opportunities for entrants to attack incumbents with a different business model, one that may neutralize the incumbent’s advantage for at least some set of customers (e.g., Netflix vs. Blockbuster). In such a context incumbents often respond by modifying their business model. We note that several of the business model-altering responses of the incumbent can be characterized in terms of co-deployment and re-deployment benefits and costs, where co-deployment benefits/cost apply to the scope economies/diseconomies in running multiple business models within the same firm and re-deployment benefits/costs apply to the implications of moving assets from one business model to another. We then examine the set of strategic choices faced by the incumbent in competing with an entrant with a different business model. We identify five set of factors that are likely to influence the decision to choose between these alternatives – uncertainty spawned by the new business model, market segment targeted by the new model, the within-business-across-business-model co-deployment and re-deployment benefits and costs, the across-business co-deployment and re-deployment benefits and costs, and the incumbent’s prior performance history. Although some of these choices have seen some work, most remain relatively underexplored in the strategy literature. We highlight the potential for research in this area with a set of propositions that identify key conditions that should hold true for a particular strategic choice to be picked by an incumbent.

The purposes of this chapter are to propose definitions of innovation, product innovation, business model innovation, marketing innovation, innovation strategy, and strategic innovation, elaborate on their literature and conceptual underpinnings, and provide an overview of the conceptual domains of innovation, innovation strategy, and strategic innovation.

First, certain definitions of innovation, drawn from literature, are presented. Next, certain definitions that incorporate logically incremental refinements in them are presented. Building on these, definitions of innovation, product innovation, business model innovation, and marketing innovation are proposed.

Innovation is the creation of value by using relevant knowledge and resources for conversion of an idea into a new product, process, or practice, or improvements in an existing product, process, or practice. Innovation strategy is an organization’s relative emphasis on different types of innovations and the associated pattern of resource allocation, in alignment with its strategy at the corporate and business unit levels. Strategic innovation is the creation of value by using relevant knowledge and resources for conversion of an idea into a new product, process, or practice with the potential to have a major transformational effect on the evolution of markets and industries.

Over the past several decades, there has been a sustained and high level of interest in issues relating to innovation among academics in a number of disciplines, business and social entrepreneurs, business practitioners, and policy makers. Books, journal articles, and business magazine articles provide a number of definitions of innovation and specific types of innovation. Multiple definitions of a construct can be problematic in certain respects and beneficial in other respects. A potential upside of multiple definitions of innovation is the prospect of each being a source of ideas for one or more innovations that benefit society, and an impetus for research focusing on specific questions.

Implementation of an idea, value creation, and use of relevant knowledge and resources are used as constituent elements in the proposed definitions of innovation, product innovation, business model innovation, marketing innovation, and strategic innovation.

This chapter discusses the theoretical framework of the strategic knowledge creation process for realizing business innovation. It presents an explanation of the relationship between the concept of the business community that originates with the formation of “Ba” (which is required in the formulation and execution of the strategic knowledge creation process) and the strategic knowledge creation process. The chapter also analyzes and examines the theoretical framework where the holistic leadership of practitioners achieves new business innovation through the formation of a business community, which is the organizational platform for practicing strategic knowledge creation, that is, the sharing, inspiration, creation, and stockpiling of knowledge.

In particular, the chapter presents a dynamic, theoretical framework where all practitioners at every level of management demonstrate holistic leadership across a three-layered structure (three practice layers) including the formal organization layer, the informal organization layer, and the psychological boundary layer to connect elements for formulating and executing macro and micro strategies and the business community, which has its origins in the formation of “Ba,” to drive the strategic knowledge creation processes.