Corporate Strategies in Nordic Industrial Companies

Abstract

Nowadays there is not a single CEO leading a large company without having a strategy in place. Strategy sets the direction for a company and forces firms to make trade-offs between different priorities. In general, strategy can be divided to corporate strategy and competitive strategy both looking for creating more value.

The purpose of this study is to provide a baseline study of strategies and strategic focus areas in large Nordic industrial companies. The analysis is built on top of literature review of the different strategic frameworks and theories ranging from strategy development to the strategy execution. Qualitative empirical data has been collected from public sources to limit the bias, analysed in detail and benchmarked.

After completing the cross-case analysis, the study indicates that one can see patterns in firm’s strategic focus areas. Companies focus mostly on innovating new products and services, finding ways to become more customer centric, ensuring and developing efficiency in their current operations and having the best people making this all happen. This would pro-pose that at least on high level topics the companies are imitating each other more than trying differentiate to seek for competitive advantage. Therefore, thesis has provided a baseline for the future research which should extend to further test different hypotheses highlighted as part of the study.