Strategy as Projects: A New Approach to Analyze Strategic Renewal

This paper proposes the adoption of a project-based view to analyze strategy formation and strategic renewal over time. Projects are resource-committing, empirically-tracable investments, and as such, particularly suitable for the analysis of different manifestations of intended strategies as well as post-hoc manifestations of deviant, even rebellious, actions taken in opposition to the initial strategy announcement. The paper presents an analytical framework (a 5x2 matrix) of ten different project categories that together allows researchers to investigate how strategic renewal is realized through the enactment of different types of project initiatives throughout the organization. The developed framework is validated by two field studies that outline the robustness of the proposed matrix. In addition to the demonstration of the advantages of the framework, we discuss the limitations of the strategy-as-projects approach as well as the implications for future strategy research and management practice.