DB8750 is the strategy and innovation specialization equivalent of DB8650 — the seminar in which students transform the approved topic proposal from DB8740 into a rigorous, scholarly literature review that documents the existing knowledge base, identifies the gap the capstone will address, and provides the theoretical and methodological foundation for the investigation ahead. The strategy and innovation literature presents distinctive review challenges: the field draws from multiple disciplines (economics, sociology, organizational behavior, information systems, psychology), the major frameworks are contested and actively debated, and the pace of new scholarship is rapid — requiring students to engage with recent literature without losing historical depth.
Navigating the strategy and innovation literature
Major streams to cover in strategy and innovation literature reviews
- Strategy literature streams: The strategy field has developed around several competing theoretical traditions that a doctoral-level review must engage with seriously. The industrial organization economics tradition (Porter's frameworks) emphasizes industry structure as the primary determinant of competitive advantage — a literature review in this tradition must engage with the empirical evidence on industry vs. firm effects in variance decomposition studies (which show that firm-level factors typically explain more variance in profitability than industry factors, though the magnitude varies by industry). The resource-based view tradition (Penrose, Wernerfelt, Barney, Peteraf) emphasizes internal resources and capabilities — a review must engage with the VRIN framework, the dynamic capabilities extension, and the empirical tests of RBV predictions. The knowledge-based view (Kogut & Zander, Grant) treats knowledge as the primary strategic resource — particularly relevant for innovation-focused capstones. The behavioral theory of the firm (Cyert & March; Simon's bounded rationality) emphasizes how cognitive limitations and organizational processes shape strategic decisions — particularly relevant for capstones investigating strategy process rather than strategy content
- Innovation literature streams: The innovation management literature has multiple streams that DB8750 literature reviews may need to engage with depending on the capstone topic. The economics of innovation tradition (Schumpeter, Arrow, Teece) examines innovation as a market phenomenon — appropriability, the conditions under which innovators can capture value from their innovations, spillovers, and the innovation incentives created by different market and IP structures. The organizational innovation tradition (Daft, Damanpour, Amabile) examines the organizational conditions that predict innovation output — leadership, culture, structure, and process factors. The innovation management and new product development literature (Cooper's Stage-Gate, Wheelwright & Clark) examines the processes through which organizations develop and launch innovative products. The technology management tradition (Utterback, Abernathy, Christensen) examines the patterns of technological change and how they create and destroy competitive advantage. The appropriate literature streams for a specific capstone depend on whether the capstone is focused on innovation outputs, innovation processes, innovation strategy, or innovation ecosystem management
Systematic search and source selection in strategy and innovation
DB8750 develops systematic literature search competencies for the strategy and innovation domain — moving beyond casual Google Scholar searches to the structured database searches that produce comprehensive, defensible coverage of the relevant literature. The course examines the primary databases for strategy and innovation scholarship: ABI/INFORM Complete and Business Source Complete for practitioner-oriented and applied management journals; Web of Science and Scopus for citation tracking and systematic review methodology; JSTOR for historical access to foundational strategy journals. The key journals in strategy (Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management, Journal of Business Research) and innovation (Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Technovation, R&D Management) provide the core of a rigorous DBA literature review — reviews that rely primarily on practitioner publications (Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly), textbooks, or airport business books fail to demonstrate doctoral-level engagement with the scholarly knowledge base. The course also examines how to balance breadth (covering the major empirical and theoretical contributions) with recency (engaging with scholarship published in the last five years to reflect current understanding) and depth (engaging seriously with the methodology and findings of key studies rather than citing them superficially).
Synthesizing contested frameworks
DB8750 develops the literature review skill of engaging productively with theoretical frameworks that are actively contested — where leading scholars disagree about fundamental claims and where the empirical evidence supports competing interpretations. The strategy and innovation field is particularly rich with such contestation: Does industry structure or firm capabilities primarily determine profitability? Do competitive advantages persist in high-velocity environments, or is competitive advantage inherently transient? Does open innovation provide genuine advantage, or does knowledge sharing primarily benefit knowledge recipients rather than contributors? Is disruptive innovation a reliable predictive theory, or an after-the-fact narrative imposed on complex competitive histories? The doctoral literature review skill is not to take sides in these debates or to pretend they do not exist, but to fairly characterize the competing positions, evaluate the evidence for each, identify where empirical research has resolved or failed to resolve the theoretical dispute, and draw appropriate conclusions about what the field currently "knows" — acknowledging uncertainty where it exists rather than presenting false consensus. Reviews that present a single framework as authoritative while ignoring competing perspectives demonstrate insufficient doctoral-level engagement with the scholarly literature, even if the selected framework is widely used in practice.
DB8750 produces a complete synthetic literature review supporting the strategy/innovation capstone topic, data collection design, and theoretical framework
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Frequently asked questions
DB8750 develops source selection criteria that enable students to identify the highest-quality, most appropriate sources for their specific capstone topics. For strategy and innovation topics, the most important peer-reviewed journals span two domains. For core strategy scholarship: Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) is the field's flagship journal and is essential for any strategy capstone review — it publishes both theoretical and empirical work across all strategy traditions; Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) publishes empirical research across all management domains including strategy; Academy of Management Review (AMR) publishes conceptual and theoretical work — important for framework-focused reviews; Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) publishes both quantitative and qualitative organizational research with high methodological rigor; Journal of Management (JOM) provides accessible high-quality empirical research across strategy and organizational topics. For innovation scholarship: Research Policy is the premier journal for economics-of-innovation and innovation management research; Journal of Product Innovation Management covers new product development and innovation management from a practitioner-relevant perspective; Technovation focuses on technology management and entrepreneurship; R&D Management provides management-oriented innovation research. The annual impact factors and h-indices of these journals provide one (imperfect) quality signal, but DB8750 develops more sophisticated quality assessment — examining methodology rigor, sample quality, theoretical grounding, and citation impact for individual studies rather than relying solely on journal prestige as a proxy for study quality. For digital transformation topics specifically, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) are essential additions. Students are encouraged to perform citation backward-searching (finding foundational sources by tracing what their key sources cite) and forward-searching (finding recent sources that cite key foundational papers) to ensure comprehensive and current literature coverage.