The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether a given opportunity is attractive or whether a particular strategy is likely to work, they generally don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. As the legendary strategy expert Gary Hamel put it: “The dirty little secret of the strategy industry is that it doesn’t have any theory of strategy creation.”
All Business Strategies Fall into 4 Categories
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The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether an opportunity is attractive or whether a given strategy is likely to work, they generally don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. This article introduces a framework, built on an in-depth analysis of the creativity literature, that aims to fill that gap by providing a systematic approach to identifying potential strategies. The framework categorizes all strategies into the following four groups, from the least creative to the most creative: adapting an existing industry strategy, combining different existing industry strategies, importing strategies from other industries, and creating a brand new strategy from scratch.
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