Investigating the Formulation and Implementation of Strategy Through Project Selection in the Swedish Process Industry

Corporate strategies have a low success rate and strategic objectives are frequently not met. To gain insight into this phenomenon, this research explores the process of generating and implementing strategy through CAPEX projects within the mature Swedish process industry. By the use of the grounded theory methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven professionals from five different industries matching the description of a process industry. The results suggest that the concentration and capital intensiveness of the process industry in Sweden calls for an emphasis on asset management, production, and product portfolios with objectives primarily being sustainability or growth related. Examples of sustainability objectives are emissions, carbon footprint, raw materials and safety, whereas growth related objectives often refer to finding the firms position in the market, reaching economies of scope and scale, and optimizing the product portfolio regionally. A crucial tool for implementing strategy is project selection, the results suggest that a mix of two approaches (bottom-up and the bucket model) is often used. This combined approach is just briefly mentioned in literature, however, in this research it has been referred to as “empty bucket model” in this research due to similarities with the bucket model. Further research recommendations include conducting surveys based on identified themes or diving deeper into particular areas such as recent agility improvements.