Our research was motivated by our fascination with the “Profit Patterns” book , which -despite its being published nearly 20 years ago- is still an excellent resource to develop strategies across industries. We were particularly enchanted with the extensiveness in which the cases where each strategy applies. While the strategy suggestions in the book followed a structure, it was still not codified in an easy-to-use form, and was still tacit knowledge.
The first epiphany moment was when we realized that the “rules” in the “Profit Patterns” book can be “drawn” as a graph. This realization was reflected in the thesis of one of our research members, Ilter Irdesel, and was the basis of his M.Sc. thesis research. Ilter Irdesel’s thesis focused on developing an expert system based on this graph representation.
The second epiphany moment was when we realized that the “strategy graphs” could actually be visualized in different ways using various layout algorithms, yielding new insights. This second a-ha has been the motivation and source of the research we conducted.
Based on the above main ideas, we developed, for the first time in literature, a mapping of knowledge on strategic management to a graph, and visually mine that graph using graph layout techniques.
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