Strategic processes, uncertainty and innovation: case study in biotech industry

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Andriyanenko, A., 2006. Strategic processes, uncertainty and innovation: case study in biotech industry. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

By applying ethnographic approach in the context of the small innovative biotechnological company this research offers new ways to conceptualise strategic processes and their relations to organisational culture, order and successful continuation of the organisation into the future. Adopting a process informed methodology and building on the concepts of emergent strategy and strategic story this thesis offers a new conceptual framework which allows making sense of why and how certain initiatives and interpretations in a given organisational context would enjoy commitment of organisational members and key resource holders while others would fail.

By separating patterns of organisational life into patterns of organisational culture and organisational order the suggested framework identifies both sources of new interpretations of organisational future and limitations for such interpretations. The thesis also introduces a new concept of strategic story making which includes processes of strategy practice as opposed to strategic story telling which focuses exclusively on verbal communication. It then employs the criterion of the effective story: a dynamic mix of credibility and defamiliarisation, to analyse emerging organisational strategy.

The newly developed framework is applied to strategists in the biotechnological company and suggests that higher degrees of perceived uncertainty provide more freedom for formal strategists in enacting new desirable futures for their organisation. It provides a way for making sense of the unique nature of innovation as strategic processes which resolve limiting inconsistencies between organisational order and organisational culture when new and significantly different interpretations of organisational futures are offered. The thesis draws conclusion about inability of any strategy to eliminate uncertainty in general but it allows substituting one set of critical uncertainties with others which are more tolerated at the time.

The thesis draws together and successfully relates together in one conceptual framework a number of very influential and powerful concepts in the field of strategy process research such as culture, order, structuration, innovation, uncertainty, strategic story, strategy practice, organisational context and environment. In doing so it answers a continuous call in academic papers for consolidation and a need to position various researches and conceptualisations in relation to each other.

Item Type:

Thesis

Creators:

Andriyanenko, A.

Date:

2006

ISBN:

9781369316254

Identifiers: