The origin of strategy. Inglesina Baby S.P.A Case Study

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to underline the growing importance of knowledge strategies, cognitive and experiential logic of strategic choice and leadership analyzing psychological types to better understand the issue of identity in companies (e.g Inglesina). In summary, this thesis wants to explore in depth the concept of strategy, answering question such as : Where does a firm’s strategy come from? How managers search for a strategy? etc... First of all, firms need to invest in knowledge because is a dynamic key resource that could be maintened in the long run and it allows a sustainable competitive advantage for the company. Knowledge Management can be considered to be one of the most important dynamic capabilities and the principle driver of all other competencies and capabilities ( Kogut, Zander 1992). In this work we focused on internal and external knowledge related to Exploitation and Exploration. Therefore the creation or acquisition of new knowledge is called exploration while the ability of leverage existing knowledge to create new processes or to improve product or services is called exploitation. A second way to orient a knowledge strategy is to describe the firm's primary sources of knowledge (Bierly and Chakrabarti 1996). Knowledge resources could be within the firm (internal knowledge) or outside the firm (external knowledge). Another fundamental part of knowledge is firm’s intellectual capital which comprises knowledge, experience and abilities of employees within the organization and it is managed by Human resource department. HRM must be congruent with the firm’s strategy to positively affect firm’s performance. There are different kind of firm’s knowledge strategy, and few firms are able to focus either on exploration and exploitation, especially due to limited resources (e. g Inglesina has a problem about the Governance in which one of the founder tent to a double loop learning (exploration) and the other one prefer the security of a single loop learning (exploitation). As researchers (e.g., Volberda 1996, Hedlund 1994) have pointed out, focusing on new, radical knowledge and focusing on incrementally enhancing a current knowledge base often require very different types of organizational cultures, skills, and structures (Bierly, Daly 2002: 279). For example smaller firms often have less resource and for this reason operational choice are limited, so in order to compete in a global environmment, small firms need to have highly motivated and highly skilled workers (Holt 1993). The second theme deals with the dualism of Experiential and Cognitive based logic of choice, which includes firms that act with positive and negative reinforcement of prior choices (backward - looking) or firms which prefer to act on beliefs derived from the actor’s mental model of the world (forward – looking), so strategy basically has a dual nature, firms can chose between cognition and mental processes and the world of action, which includes routines, rules, trial and error and firm’s activities (Gavetti, Rivkin, 2004). These model of search came from Positioning School and Evolutionary Economics, two tendency that allow to investigate more about plasticity and rationality of firms. Investigating the tensions in the knowledge management and in positioning strategies permitts to observe behavioral patterns, but such tensions are due to cognitive models of governance, this is the reason why the third part of this dissertation take into account the leadership style, in which stands out the Theory of Personality developed by Jung and carried out also by Myers-Briggs. Jung proposed the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions: 1)The "rational" (judging) functions: thinking and feeling. 2)The "irrational" (perceiving) functions: sensation and intuition.These two functions are examined for the specific purpose of identifying the division inside Inglesina’s governance.