Corporate Strategy: Overview and Future Challenges

This chapter offers a brief historical overview of corporate strategy and highlights avenues for future research. Prior works on corporate strategy, represented by diversification strategy, find that corporate strategy indeed matters for firm performance. Prior works in corporate strategy, however, focused mostly on the contemporaneous sharing of resources across businesses, employed rough measures for resources, and suffered from data and methodological constraints. The chapter outlines several areas for the future direction of corporate strategy research, calling for new theoretical angles, a more dynamic approach, better measures and methodology, attention to internal coordination costs and control systems, and expansion to more diverse institutional environments. In sum, corporate strategy remains an exciting area for future research with ever more interesting new phenomena and changes in external environments to study, which will be crucial to generating important insights for managers.