Narrow Results

Three core imperatives are essential for modern businesses and organizations: seamless integration of customer and operational processes, agility, and the ability to change. These imperatives are relevant in view of successfully executing strategic choices, but all too often not satisfied.

Businesses and organizations are complex adaptive socio-technical systems and can be viewed from two fundamentally different perspectives: the functional (black-box) perspective and the constructional (white-box) perspective. Management and governance of businesses and organizations regard the functional, black-box perspective, which is inherently ill-suited for addressing the imperatives mentioned. It will be argued that establishing system integration, agility and change requires a focus on the system's design, hence necessitates the constructional perspective.

The concept of architecture is considered fundamental for operationalizing the constructional perspective. Next to the more familiar notion of technology architecture, the concepts of business, organizational and information architecture are formally introduced and elucidated. Various domains within these architectures will be highlighted, whereby the importance of coherence and consistency is stressed, especially in view of the ability to change. Collectively, the four architectures are labeled Enterprise Architecture. Finally, enterprise architecture will be positioned as a crucial means for linking strategy development and execution.

The front-end phase is in the literature generally regarded as the most critical phase of the innovation process. Front-end management has a strategic nature since important decisions related e.g. to target markets and the main functionalities of products are done in the front-end phase. This article examines how the integration of strategic and operative level front-end activities is perceived by top managers in the product innovation context. The findings indicate that companies exploit different strategy-making processes, and that each strategy-making mode is prone to particular integration challenges. The results show that the effectiveness of integration of strategic and operative level front-end activities is dependent on the level of concreteness of the defined business strategies, the amount of business-minded decision making, and the balance between control and creativity.

Strategy implementation is an important aspect of innovation, as only 30% of planned strategies are matched by realised innovation outcomes. The present study investigates this in a setting of strategic implementation of New Product Development (NPD). In the implementation process, the managers’ characteristics are what lead to successful implementation of NPD. Managers’ characteristics affect the decision outcome. This study incorporates curiosity as a personal trait and NPD experience as a personal characteristic of the manager as moderating effects of the strategy implementation process of NPD. 131 NPD managers of Scandinavia SBUs participated in the study. Data were analysed using partial least squares regression. The study finds that managers influence the realised NPD strategy. NPD managers impose competence traps on strategy implementation. Curious NPD managers implementing aggressive strategic intentions create information overload in the NPD process, which decreases the new product novelty. In contrast, realisation of defensive strategic intentions makes experienced NPD managers focus on known NPD competences, thereby decreasing the new product novelty of NPD efforts. The study identified inadequately developed information competences among NPD managers. The result shows the importance of analysing how personal characteristics facilitate or hinder NPD strategy implementation. The competitive advantage of NPD efforts relies on such an analysis.

Strategy implementation is considered as an essential part of strategic planning because it translates the chosen strategy into organizational action. Considering its high failure rates, substantial attention should be given to strategy implementation, especially in non-government organizations, as most past studies have focused on issues prevailing in profit-making entities and the public sector. Thus, this becomes the aim of this paper to investigate factors influencing strategy implementation in non-government organizations in Brunei. In order to answer the research aim, a structured survey was conducted, and both descriptive inference statistical analysis techniques were used to analyze the data. The study concludes that organizational structure and leadership have a strong relation to the strategy implementation in non-government organizations; it has also been revealed that organizational culture and external factors do not influence strategy implementation. Not only that the results of the study can validate previous research studies, but also they can help managers and practitioners to understand how the four variables identified in the study can influence strategy implementation within their organization.