Research Into The Factors Influencing Corporate Strategy Evolution

Nowadays, macroeconomic situation is quite serious, foreign economic recovery is slow, and with the domestic industrial structure adjustment, the economic growth is slowing down. What’s more, the wave of the Internet and mobile Internet is constantly pounding all walks of life, so intra-industry and inter-industry competition is increasingly fierce, consumer demand and technology updates are changing faster and faster. All these strengthen companies’ operating environment risk, and place higher demands on strategic management ability. In addition, the Chinese companies’ average life-span is short, start-up failure rate is high, the operation and management ability is relatively weak, especially compared with the excellent international companies, the gap is sometimes huge, so the way to solve problems which emerg in different growth stages, to achieve sustainable development, to catch up with outstanding companies, is a big problem in front of business and management researchers. Most of existing theories analysis the influencing factors of corporate strategy and change from a static perspective, and lacks the research on strategy evolution during companies’ growth process. As a result, based on current research, it’s difficult for companies to decide to adopt or pursuit what kind of strategy according to current external environment and their own conditions. In all, current research offers not enough strong guidance to companies.In view of this, this paper focuses on the influencing factors of corporate strategy evolution, and explores the evolution path, the drivers and influencing facors in each phase of companies’ strategy evolution from its establishment, and tries to find some basic laws, important drivers and influencing factors.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows.(1) We can use three dimensions to describe companies’ strategy status; that is,"industry-product-region "(strategic positioning),"internal-external"(growth pattern), and "innovation imitation"(strategy realization mode).(2) In early stage, companies always adopt the strategy of specialization, internal growth, and focusing on one market, those who have sound technical ability will adopt the independent innovation strategy or combined with imitation, those whose technical ability is weak will adopt imitation strategy.(3) Companies tend to adopt the combination of internal and external growth pattern preasently, and their sales networks cover all over the world. In traditional business domain, they maily rely on independent innovation, while introduced innovation is the major method in new domain.(4) Specialization and diversification are both necessary, companies should take into consideration industry technical barrier, market capacity, their own growth stage and capabilities to decide the appropriate strategy. Up to now, most companies diversify their business based on their core competency (i.e., related diversification), or extend product-line and regional market under specialization strategy.(5) Performance pressure is the most direct and common dirver that triggers strategy evolution, company pursuit is an active driver, the dramatic change in macro and industry environment is passive driver, and an intermediate driver is founded which trigger strategy evolution via inducing internal motivation (e.g., market opportunity finding, acquaintance recommendation). Today, the trand of initiative change is very clear.(6) Companies’ competence and resource are the most important factors influencing strategy evolution, macro and industry environment are also common influencing factors, and existing strategy and top management team often exert influence when companies reach their growth and mature stage. In addition, some accidental factors will also affect the process of strategy evolution.(7) The parrten of corporate strategy evolution in this study reflects a combination of strategic planning and strategic exploration (such as acquaintance recommendation, new ideas from business communication, opportunity finding).(8) This paper preliminarily constructs the theoretical model of drivers and influencing factors of corporate strategy evolution for further research.Finally, this paper puts forward several practical implications, and several interesting directions for future research.