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Strategy Question: How do I assess the “market health” of my products or services?

Summary: This isn’t really a new tool per se, as it is based on the original Boston Consulting Group’s Growth–Share matrix and General Electric/McKinsey Consulting 9-box version. We base our tool on the 9-box version that plots a point for each product/service form relative to our preferred elements of “Competitive Position” and “Market Attractiveness.” The chapter explains how to breakdown the products/services, construct plot points for the matrix (in qualitative fashion that most companies can easily construct) for both the “competitive position” and “market attractiveness” metrics. The tool consists of a one-page, 3 × 3 matrix along with a process to gather, assess, and organize the information so the strategist can determine how the various products and services of the business are positioned in the respective markets, how well each is performing, how much each contributes to overall firm performance, which have potential for future performance, and what types of approaches might be appropriate for allocating resources. Once products/services are respectively plotted and grouped in common ways suggested, the output is extremely helpful in framing the competitive state and providing a baseline for constructive intercompany debate.

Adapting to external and internal transformations is a difficult task that managers and scholars must face while attempting to keep their organisations alive and well-established. This chapter explores the various decision-making tools that can assist practitioners and scholars to improve their understanding of the external scenario to determine the contemporary appropriateness of these approaches for analysing the environment and their implications for various types of organisations. The chapter investigates the barriers and drivers of these methods and proposes existing alternative paradigms created by academics and practitioners to analyse and comprehend the context. It demonstrates how these decision-making tools can be implemented by providing examples and case studies.

Strategy Question: How do we determine and prioritize which products/services need action?

Summary: This very important tool helps provide a perspective on where product/service improvements are needed relative to performance and margin parameters. It is designed to provide a concise “current state” assessment of product/service offerings using three categories: (1) No deficiency — competitive in both Product and Price/Cost areas (color coded white), (2) One deficiency — Product performance or Price/Margin deficiency (color coded gray); and (3) Two deficiencies — Product performance and Price/margin deficiency (color coded black). When these product/service deficiencies are displayed relative to the most important market segments (ranked in decreasing order of priority), the tool output serves as an insightful baseline from which to scope, frame, define and prioritize product improvement and margin-enhancement projects needed. Your list of potential projects begins here. Many of the prior tools come together at this point. Through previous tools, the markets, environment, and the current competitive positions of the products or services are understood. This tool helps to define a structure to pull all this information together in a simple way to add perspective toward defining and prioritizing potential actions.

The globalisation of markets, emerging concepts of sustainable development, and circular economy have defined the boundaries within which organisations must compete and address the needs of key stakeholders. As circumstances change, boundaries are often replaced by the relationships between companies and the communities they serve. Consequently, strategy has become a central aspect of sustainable leadership and the foundation for implementing strategic management in a dynamic system of relationships. Every company is born and grows within social and economic ecosystems. Drawing on the metaphor of biology, ecosystems are described as dynamic interconnections among various elements that influence and foster entrepreneurship. Interconnections between players (such as marketplaces, organisations, governments, and universities) create a flow of expertise, abilities, knowledge, experience, and tangible resources. Economic and social ecosystems involve various actors and components that continuously coexist and interact, leading to the creation of numerous mutual relationships. Consequently, it is crucial for managers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the internal and external environments. Various decision-making tools and strategies can be used to achieve this goal. These tools were developed to assist managers, researchers, and consultants in making informed decisions under complex scenarios. This chapter presents several decision-making strategies and tools, including the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix, General Electric (GE) matrix, Balanced Scorecard (BSC), PEST, PESTEL analysis, and SWOT analysis.

In an era of unprecedented technological innovation and evolving user expectations and information seeking behaviour, we are arguably now an online society, with digital services increasingly common and increasingly preferred. As a trusted information provider, libraries are in an advantageous position to respond, but this requires integrated strategic and enterprise architecture planning, for information technology (IT) has evolved from a support role to a strategic role, providing the core management systems, communication networks and delivery channels of the modern library. Furthermore, IT components do not function in isolation from one another but are interdependent elements of distributed and multidimensional systems encompassing people, processes and technologies, which must consider social, economic, legal, organisational and ergonomic requirements and relationships, as well as being logically sound from a technical perspective. Strategic planning provides direction, while enterprise architecture strategically aligns and holistically integrates business and information system architectures. While challenging, such integrated planning should be regarded as an opportunity for the library to evolve as an enterprise in the digital age, or at minimum, to simply keep pace with societal change and alternative service providers. Without strategy, a library risks being directed by outside forces with independent motivations and inadequate understanding of its broader societal role. Without enterprise architecture, it risks technological disparity, redundancy and obsolescence. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this conceptual chapter provides an integrated framework for strategic and architectural planning of digital library services. The concept of the library as an enterprise is also introduced.

Strategic option generation is a fundamental step in strategy formulation. Several lenses have been proposed to explain its foundations, including the microeconomics positioning school, and the resource and capabilities based view of the firm. These approaches are largely based on inductive and deductive logics, which are not the logics that provide strategic options that are potentially novel, profitable, and largely differentiated from competitive offerings. In this chapter, we propose a unifying framework of the cognitive foundations of strategic option generation. Building on five fundamental cognitive acts – imitation, framing, analogical reasoning, abductive reasoning, and mental simulation, this proposed model both synthesizes the extant literature and provides guidance about promising avenues for future theoretical and empirical research.

This paper explores how two understudied characteristics of a firm's product portfolio, namely, aging of products and (non)innovativeness of products, affect firm survival. The influence of these product portfolio characteristics on organizational mortality can be observed both at the firm and at the industry levels. Paradoxically, the portfolio's influence at the firm and at the industry levels may go in opposite directions. Specifically, I predict that portfolios with aging products make their firms weaker competitors and survivors. However by weakening these firms, “aging” portfolios reduce competitive pressures at the industry level and, therefore, improve firm survival indirectly by changing industry vital rates. In contrast, firms with innovative product portfolios should be stronger survivors. At the same time, they are likely to intensify competition in the industry and, as a result, diminish survival chances of all firms, including those with innovative products. The analyses of all firms’ product portfolios in the worldwide optical disk drive industry, 1983–1999, support these predictions.