A Project-based Perspective on Strategic Renewal

This paper adopts a project-based perspective to analyze how strategic renewal evolves in organizations over time. Projects are temporary resource-committing activities that deliberately impose changes on existing business operations and, thereby, generate strategic renewal. Projects can be empirically identified and are, therefore, suited for analyzing manifestations of deliberate and emergent strategies driven by employee behaviors that either comply with or deviate from the official strategy. In the paper, we present ten theoretically derived project categories that can be used to analyze strategic renewal through the enactment of different projects. We also discuss the implications and limitations of the project-based perspective for strategy research and management practice.