Strategy

Strategy is the disciplined inquiry into how organisations may uniquely mobilise and align their resources, capabilities and structures to achieve long-term objectives and secure a competitive advantage. Rooted in classical military thought but enriched by economic theory, organisational studies and behavioural sciences, strategy examines both deliberate planning and emergent adaptation in contexts characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. At its core lies the creation, delivery and capture of differentiated value for stakeholders, encompassing not only financial performance but also environmental, social and governance considerations. Contemporary strategic scholarship has broadened from static positioning models emphasising industry structure to dynamic frameworks addressing evolving industry life cycles, global value chains, technological disruption and digital platforms. Techniques for strategic diagnosis and formulation range from competitive analysis and resource-based assessments to scenario planning, evolutionary models and systems mapping. Across private, public and not-for-profit sectors, strategy research highlights the interplay between top-down directives and bottom-up experimentation, the balance between exploration and exploitation, and the role of leadership and organisational learning in orchestrating change. Practical applications span market entry and alliance formation, corporate portfolio decisions, sustainable innovation and agile responses to crises. By integrating insights from diverse methods—from game-theoretic modelling to processual case studies—strategy as a field continues to illuminate the processes through which organisations navigate complexity and pursue sustainable success.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent work has investigated how individual entrepreneurial orientation affects readiness for venture creation among emerging scientists, finding that proactive and innovative dispositions significantly influence entrepreneurial intention while risk-taking shows a more nuanced effect. In a complementary enquiry, scholars examined environmental sustainability orientations alongside entrepreneurial behaviours in greenhouse operations, demonstrating that managers who combine environmental awareness with innovation and proactiveness report superior performance in customer growth, sales and profitability. Another study explored how board characteristics modulate the link between entrepreneurial orientation and radical innovation in manufacturing firms, revealing that factors such as CEO duality and board independence strengthen this relationship, whereas larger board size or higher ownership concentration may dampen its impact.

Strategy publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in strategy across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Entrepreneurial orientation: A firm’s propensity to engage in innovativeness, proactiveness and calculated risk-taking to seize new opportunities.

Radical innovation: The development of entirely new products or processes that break existing technological or market paradigms.

Problem representation: The cognitive framing through which decision-makers interpret complex issues, shaping the generation and evaluation of strategic alternatives.

Behavioural integration: The degree of collaborative interaction, mutual information exchange and joint accountability within a leadership team during decision-making.

Differential game: A mathematical framework capturing strategic interactions over time, in which players’ dynamic investment choices (e.g. in R&D) affect shared outcomes.

References

1. Strategy: Foundations and Perspectives.
2. Individual entrepreneurial orientation for entrepreneurial readiness. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2024).
3. The effect of environmental sustainability orientations and entrepreneurial orientations on the performance of greenhouses. Scientific Reports (2024).
4. Which kind of board benefits more from the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and radical innovation? The asymmetric roles of board characteristics in China. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2023).
5. Developing Problem Representations in Organizations: A Synthesis across Literatures and an Integrative Framework. Journal of Management (2024).
6. Fast and high‐quality decision‐making: The role of behavioral integration. European Management Review (2023).
7. Mixed Market Structure and R &D: A Differential Game Approach. Dynamic Games and Applications (2023).