Strategy and innovation are intimately connected — effective strategy without innovation produces competitive convergence and eventual decline; innovation without strategy produces unfocused activity that rarely creates sustainable advantage. DB8710 develops doctoral-level understanding of both domains and their intersection: how organizations theorize about their competitive environment, craft strategies that exploit distinctive capabilities, and execute those strategies through operational and organizational choices — while simultaneously building the innovation capacity that enables sustained competitive renewal.
Strategic management theory at the doctoral level
Major theoretical frameworks in strategy scholarship
- Positioning and competitive advantage: DB8710 examines Michael Porter's (1980, 1985) competitive strategy framework — one of the most influential bodies of work in management scholarship. The Five Forces framework (threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, threat of substitute products, rivalry among existing competitors) analyzes industry structure to identify the determinants of industry profitability — the observation that competitive advantage is more readily achieved in favorable industry structures. The generic strategies framework (cost leadership, differentiation, focus) proposes that organizations must choose a clear competitive position rather than being "stuck in the middle" between cost and differentiation. Porter's value chain framework examines competitive advantage at the activity level — how specific configurations of primary and support activities create the cost positions and differentiation drivers that determine competitive advantage. The empirical evidence on Porter's framework is substantial but mixed: industry structure explains some variance in firm performance, but firm-level factors (capabilities, management quality, competitive positioning) explain substantially more, suggesting that the resource-based view adds important explanatory power that industry-structure analysis alone does not capture
- Resource-based view and dynamic capabilities: The resource-based view (Penrose, 1959; Wernerfelt, 1984; Barney, 1991) locates competitive advantage in the firm's internal resources and capabilities rather than its external competitive position. Resources are strategically valuable when they are valuable (they help the firm exploit opportunities or neutralize threats), rare (not possessed by current or potential competitors), inimitable (difficult for competitors to acquire or replicate), and non-substitutable (competitors cannot achieve equivalent results through alternative resources) — the VRIN criteria. Dynamic capabilities theory (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997; Teece, 2007) extends the RBV to high-velocity environments: competitive advantage in rapidly changing markets requires not just having valuable resources, but the organizational capability to sense new opportunities, seize them through resource reconfiguration, and transform the organization as the competitive environment changes
- Blue ocean strategy and value innovation: Kim and Mauborgne's (2005) Blue Ocean Strategy proposes that the most productive strategic move is not competing in existing market space (red oceans defined by current industry boundaries) but creating new market space (blue oceans) by making competition irrelevant — simultaneously achieving differentiation and low cost through value innovation that redefines the value curve for customers. The empirical evidence on blue ocean strategy is primarily case-based, but the framework's analytical tools (strategy canvas, four actions framework, six paths to blue ocean strategy) provide practical methodologies that DB8710 examines and applies
Innovation theory and management
DB8710 examines innovation management through the scholarly literature — covering both the economics and sociology of innovation and the organizational management of innovation processes. Joseph Schumpeter's creative destruction concept (1942) provides the foundational observation that capitalism's dynamic is driven by innovation — new products, processes, markets, and organizational forms that render existing ones obsolete, displacing incumbent firms and industries in waves of creative destruction. Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation theory (1997, 2003) distinguishes sustaining innovation (improving existing products along dimensions that mainstream customers value — what incumbents do well) from disruptive innovation (initially inferior products that serve underserved or non-consuming market segments and improve over time to displace incumbents). The disruptive innovation framework explains why market leaders so often fail when disruption occurs — their resource allocation processes, performance metrics, and customer listening practices all direct attention toward sustaining the core business rather than investing in initially unprofitable disruptive opportunities. Open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) challenges the closed R&D model — the premise that firms should generate, develop, and commercialize their own innovations internally — and argues that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, firms that can access and integrate external knowledge (from universities, suppliers, customers, startups, and even competitors) will innovate more productively than those relying exclusively on internal R&D.
Strategy execution: from theory to practice
DB8710 examines strategy execution — the translation of strategic intent into organizational action — as arguably the most challenging and least well-understood dimension of strategic management. The "execution gap" between the quality of strategic plans and the quality of strategic implementation is well-documented: surveys of senior executives consistently show that execution, not strategy formulation, is viewed as the primary source of strategic underperformance. The course examines the organizational mechanisms through which strategies are executed: organizational alignment (ensuring that structure, systems, people, and culture are configured to execute the chosen strategy rather than the legacy strategy the organization was built to execute); strategic planning and performance management systems (how the balanced scorecard, OKRs, and other strategy execution frameworks translate strategy into operational goals, metrics, and accountability); strategic communication (how strategy is communicated to the organization in ways that enable frontline decision-making aligned with strategic intent); and strategic resource allocation (ensuring that budget, people, and attention are allocated in proportion to strategic priorities rather than organizational inertia). The course also examines strategy execution in industrial, product-based, and market-based scenarios — applying execution frameworks to the specific challenges of manufacturing firms, product companies, and market-facing commercial organizations.
Gap identification and capstone project development
DB8710 applies strategy and innovation theory to gap identification — the analytical process of identifying the specific strategy or innovation challenge in a real organizational context that could form the basis of a DBA capstone project. The course develops strategy-specific gap analysis frameworks: competitive position gap analysis (comparing the organization's current strategy against the ideal generic strategy for its competitive environment); capability gap analysis (comparing current organizational capabilities against the capabilities that the intended strategy requires); innovation portfolio gap analysis (comparing the organization's current mix of innovation investment across incremental, adjacent, and transformational categories against the mix that its competitive environment and strategic ambition require); and market opportunity gap analysis (identifying market segments or value propositions that the organization is not currently addressing but could address with strategic reconfiguration). These gap analyses directly support the problem-of-practice identification that the DB8740 capstone seminar requires for strategy and innovation specialization students.
DB8710 assignments include strategy analyses, innovation assessments, execution gap analyses, and capstone project concept papers
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Frequently asked questions
DB8710 examines strategy and innovation in the context of AI-driven transformation — one of the most consequential competitive and strategic questions facing organizations across industries. AI is changing strategic thinking in several interconnected ways. Competitive advantage reconfiguration: AI is shifting what constitutes a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Data assets (the proprietary data that trains and improves AI models) are becoming strategic resources as significant as traditional capital assets — firms with richer, more diverse, and more proprietary data can develop AI capabilities that competitors with limited data cannot replicate. This makes data strategy a central component of competitive strategy in ways that were not true in the pre-AI era. Business model disruption: generative AI is reducing the cost of content creation, code generation, data analysis, and customer interaction toward near-zero marginal cost, which fundamentally disrupts the economics of industries that produce these outputs — media, legal services, software development, consulting, and customer service are all experiencing strategic disruption. This makes identifying which activities in one's value chain are AI-substitutable — and which require human judgment, creativity, or relationship that AI cannot replicate — a critical strategic analysis. Innovation strategy: AI is accelerating innovation cycles in some domains (drug discovery, materials science, software development) dramatically, creating competitive dynamics in which speed to market and continuous iteration matter more than careful pre-launch development. This changes the optimal innovation portfolio and the organizational capabilities that innovation strategy requires. DB8710 develops the analytical frameworks to examine AI's strategic implications rigorously — not as hype, but as a genuine force reshaping competitive dynamics that strategists must engage with substantively.