Paper info

SMEs strategic visioning in business networks

Pia Storvang, Per Freytag and Ann Højbjerg Clarke

The paper was published at the 35th IMP-conference in Paris, France in 2019.

SMEs must adapt to changes in their business environment. However they are often challenged by too few resources and the executives primarily focussing on daily operations. SME executives need efficient methods and processes to ensure their strategy work results in compelling and viable visions. The study reports from four SMEs and shows how internal managers and external stakeholders can collaborate as creative sparring partners and co-create validated mutually attractive visions. The vision process revealed that the SME managers together with stakeholders could negotiate, interpret and re-framed their visioning. Forecasting is thereby not only about visioning a new future vision; it is an emergent and abductive process which also contains back-casting to reformulate how to achieve the strategy in the future.