So, you think you have an AI strategy? Think again.
of new product and strategy development
processes and practices at a Fortune 50
multi-national technology corporation
headquartered in Silicon Valley, California.
More than 30 one or two-day workshops
were held where more than 500 internal and
external stakeholders participated to tackle
a diverse mix of strategic discussions and
activities.
secondary and not the primary basis for
analysis. Furthermore, they are framed in
terms of how they impact profitability of a
market structure and other related
competitive “forces.”
In contrast, SIFA, like most modern strategy
tools, 8 is designed for both individual and
group processes and practices. SIFA is
designed to focus only on characterizing the
impact and implications of an emerging
technology, in this case AI, to at least eight
social factors as the core basis for analysis.
Yet similar to when performing a P5F
analysis where one aims to characterize the
dynamics and interplay between different
forces to give insights on drivers of
profitability and competitiveness, SIFA also
aims to characterize the dynamics and
interplay between difference social factors
to give insights on drivers of plausible
systemic risks and benefits for a particular
emerging technology.
Strategy tools are under constant
development and evolution. 6 For example,
in 1979, Michael Porter introduced the now
classical Porter’s Five Forces (P5F) 7 which
were designed to be used by individuals to
characterize the drivers of profitability of an
existing market structure. Nowadays, this
tool is severely insufficient due to a variety
of reasons; the most important being that
social factors were bolted onto the original
P5F design at a later stage by extending it to
include non-traditional “forces” of Society,
Technology, Environment and Politics
(PEST). As a result, social factors are
6
Knight, E., Paroutis, S. & Heracleous, L. (2018) The Power of PowerPoint: A Visual Perspective on Meaning Making in Strategy.
Strategic Management Journal, 39(3): 894–921.
7
https://www.isc.hbs.edu/strategy/business-strategy/Pages/the-five-forces.aspx
8
Paroutis S., Franco A. & Papadopoulos T. (2015) Visual Interactions with Strategy Tools: Producing Strategic Knowledge in
Workshops. British Journal of Management. 26: S48-S66.
IIC Journal of Innovation
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