In response to critiques of strategy tools as unhelpful or potentially dangerous for organizations, we suggest casting a sociological eye on how tools are actually mobilized by strategy makers. In conceptualizing strategy tools as tools-in-use, we offer a framework for examining the ways that the affordances of strategy tools and the agency of strategy makers interact to shape how and when tools are selected and applied. Further, rather than evaluating the ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ use of tools, we highlight the variety of outcomes that result, not just for organizations but also for the tools and the individuals who use them. We illustrate this framework with a vignette and propose an agenda and methodological approaches for further scholarship on the use of strategy tools.

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Strategy tools-in-use: A framework for understanding “technologies of rationality” in practice

Importance-Performance Analysis based SWOT analysis

A strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis has become a key tool used by businesses for strategic planning. Scholars have conducted SWOT research for over six decades. However, a collective understanding of SWOT analysis remains vague. This study accessed, analyzed, and synthesized the SWOT literature, allowing for new theoretical perspectives and frameworks to emerge. Using an integrative literature review, this study reviewed SWOT studies historically, providing a greater understanding of the SWOT analysis in different sectors and the different approaches used in SWOT studies. Furthermore, it fills the knowledge gap in the strategic planning context and indicates meaningful implications for managers that could help improve their strategic decisions.

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SWOT analysis applications: An integrative literature review

The current wildfire policies in European Union countries have not solved the wildfire problem and probably will not be effective in the future, as all the initiatives focus on suppression and minimize the use of fire embedded in the Traditional Ecologic Knowledge of European communities. The traditional fire use as a tool for land management has been handled and almost criminalized by an urban-centric perspective and anti-fire bias. These policies are poorly adapted to, and cannot cope with, the complex nature of the wildfire phenomenon since they neglect its social roots. This paper presents a forward-looking and innovative model of wildfire management focused not at the landscape, or community, or forest level but at the territory scale. Fire Smart Territory (FST) is the proposed theoretical, the context specific, and place-based operational framework. The grounding assumptions of FST are that fire is a dual and ambiguous process, that it is not merely a biophysical process with social overtones but a social process, and it is a complex issue which can be understood only in the coupled human and natural systems where it occurs. FST advocates that the current wildfire challenges cannot be solved by a check list of theoretically adequate procedures, but through locally understanding the wildfire problem and strategically preparing each territory to be less wildfire prone, and its inhabitants to be less vulnerable, and more resilient, in the scope of economic valorization, sustainable development, and safety of the territory resources.

A wildfire risk management concept based on a social-ecological approach in the European Union: Fire Smart Territory

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/5339.pdf

Selection of construction enterprises management strategy based on the SWOT and multi-criteria analysis

The SWOT analysis is the process of exploring the internal and external environments of an organization and extracting convenient strategies based on its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This paper presents a literature review of SWOT analysis, based on a reference bank of about 557 papers established through searching various databases. This paper reviews papers that have been published up to the end of 2009. The origination and historical development of SWOT are explained first, followed by a survey on trends & classifications in SWOT papers including journals, countries, years, people & contents. Then a categorical analysis is conducted about application area and scope of SWOT. Also a methodological development of SWOT is discussed. Finally, concluding remarks and a few suggestions and challenges are presented for future studies. It is hoped that the paper can serve the needs of researchers and practitioners for easy references of SWOT studies and applications, and hence promo...

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Swot Methodology: A State-of-the-Art Review for the Past, A Framework for the Future

International circumstances, Iran’s special context and its legal system have often been blamed for the relative lack of attention on the part of Iranian scientists towards Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). In spite of these odds, however, the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council (INIC) launched a programme to overcome existing shortcomings and encourage nanotechnology researchers to protect their inventions in the country and particularly, overseas. The efficiency and effectiveness of this programme are analysed in this paper. In a country without a national IP policy, successful implementation of this programme could pave the way for extending the same mechanism to other technological fields, although it is unlikely that the deficiencies of Iran's national innovation system could be completely resolved by such sectoral policies.

http://nopr.niscair.res.in/bitstream/123456789/10689/1/JIPR%2015%286%29%20464-473.pdf

Promoting Nanotechnology Patenting: A New Experience in National Innovation System of Iran

This paper contributes to identify systematic problems in NIS using Thinking Process (TOC-TP) and to eliminate the bottlenecks, which results in improving the innovation process and efficiency of NIS. The Case study in this research is the NIS of Iran. The national documents of the innovation system were studied and all problems of NIS mentioned in documents were gathered. The causal relationships between the systematic problems were identified by the survey and grouped into 6 components by Exploratory Factor Analysis: weakness in technology diffusion mechanisms, the lack of centralized governance on science and technology policy, the government's pivotal role as an executor in education and research, weak laws and regulations in the field of research and technology, the lack of adequate financial resources in R&D and the lack of any perspective on the creation of wealth and entrepreneurship among the actors of research and technology. Finally the bottleneck of Iran's NIS was recognized by Thinkin...

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Exploring the bottleneck of Iran's national innovation system by TOC thinking process

The network analysis of a technological system combines the interindustry transactions with a matrix of sectoral innovative efforts as measured by R&D investment intensity. The matrixes of interindustry transactions of R&D-embodied products (innovations) are weighted matrixes where the interindustry flows measure the intensity of the innovation diffusion. In the past, studies using this approach in innovation studies have transformed weighted matrixes into binary matrixes of zero and one element where the flows less than a selected threshold value were considered to be zero and the flows greater than the threshold value were counted as one. Such matrix transformation leads to the loss of a great deal of information. In the present study, using degree and clustering coefficients for both binary direct as well as weighted direct techno-economic networks of the manufacturing sector of the German economy, we show that the binary directed network analysis is incapable of refined ranking of interindustry innovation transactions. The total degree index based on the weighted network of the German techno-economic system assigns a unique ranking to each sector, and clustering coefficients show that at least 75% of sectors in the network of Germany have two links with the other industries. However, the same indices based on the binary network are incapable of such refined ranking.

Mansoureh Abdi

Papers

Swot Methodology: A State-of-the-Art Review for the Past, A Framework for the Future

Promoting Nanotechnology Patenting: A New Experience in National Innovation System of Iran

Exploring the bottleneck of Iran's national innovation system by TOC thinking process

The Social Network Analysis of Techno-Economic Systems: Comparing Results Based on Binary and Weighted Networks