Paper info

The perceived value of strategy tools in business network development

Hannu Alakoski and Annika Tidström

The paper was published at the 34th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2018.

The focus of this work-in-progress paper is on strategy tools, which is a topic that lately has received a lot of interest both in academia and practice. There are various streams of literature of strategy tools, ranging from traditional company-related strategy tools to more flexible and individual-based strategy tools. The IMP-approach recognize strategy tools as occurring in the interaction between firms, and it is possible to identify a research gap between the intentions of the firm and the business relationship. This paper intends to provide some initial insights into this issue. The aim of this study is to explore managerial perceptions of strategy tools as facilitators of the development of business relationships and networks. The research questions are: a) What are the perceptions of managers of strategy tools as facilitators of developing business relationships and b) how can combinations of strategy tools facilitate the development of different kinds of business relationships? In this paper, the first research question is initially explored empirically.The empirical part of the paper is based on qualitative case studies of ten companies, and more particularly on the perceptions of the managers within these companies.