The Role of Micro-strategies in the Engineering of Firm Evolution

This paper proposes a model of strategic evolution as a sequence of intentional recombinations of the company’s Core Micro-strategy with new resources and organisational routines. A Core Micro-strategy is hereby defined as the established system of interconnected routines, micro-activities and resources that can be traced in most of the company’s successful strategic initiatives. The paper is based on two comparative case studies and the theories of evolution in social and cultural systems, intraorganisational ecology and the resource-based view of the firm. The model advances the existing literature on strategy process and strategy evolution by (i) incorporating a more direct and salient role of managerial leadership within processes of strategic evolution, (ii) incorporating a central role for micro-level processes through which management can directly and intentionally shape strategic evolution, and (iii) proposing recent developments in the resource-based view of the firm as the most suitable theoretical framework to explain the processes in which strategic evolution is rooted. The paper describes the empirical evidence which emerges from cross-analysis of the two case studies; the two descriptive models of strategy evolution inductively built on the cases; the theoretical model resulting from an iteration between the two grounded models and the theoretical frameworks.