Open Strategy: Towards a Research Agenda

Abstract

Strategy development has traditionally been exclusive (i.e. the job of the top management team) and secretive (to protect competitive advantages). Social software offers new opportunities for involving a large crowd in strategy processes and thus harnessing the collective intelligence of an organization and allowing more open and participatory modes of strategizing. These new approaches, labeled as “democratizing strategy”, “open strategy”, “open-source strategy” or “strategy as a practice of thousands”, involve a large number of people in generating, discussing, and evaluating strategic ideas. In this paper, based on four case studies, we describe the new phenomenon of open strategy and discuss its implications for research and practice for strategy and information systems.