– The purpose of this paper is to find out if the approach to strategy-making taken by small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) affects their performance.
– This paper reports findings from a longitudinal study of small Austrian manufacturing firms. It investigates their use of deliberate or emergent strategy-making and how this affected market development and product innovation.
– When you think about strategy development, perhaps you think of long, serious discussions between groups of managers. But what if the organization is a small business? Leaders of SMEs do not have that option. So if an SME starts a new initiative – product development, say, or a change of marketing approach – how does this happen? Is it planned by the entrepreneur? Or – if you do not have middle managers with time to spend on strategy development – does adopting a “try it and see” approach give better results?
– It demonstrates the benefits of a longitudinal investigation of the performance effects of deliberate and emergent strategy development.
– It shows how the use of emergent or deliberate approaches to strategy development is linked to SME performance.
– It highlights the benefits of using diverse information sources – including customers and employees – as an integral part of strategy-making to identify market opportunities and trends.
– It covers an unusually long time period, enabling researchers to compare firm performance in stable and dynamic market conditions.
