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Introduction
A young scientist, Igor H. Ansoff, published his first article titled "The stability of linear oscillating systems with constant time lag" published in 1948 in the Journal of Applied Mechanics. If he only knew, that in 1957, he would publish the "Strategies for diversification" in the Harvard Business Review later to be followed with the seminal work on Corporate Strategy published in 1965, thus contributing to the intellectual domain for a new field in Strategic Management .
In 2002, strategic management lost one of its early thinkers and writers, Igor Ansoff. Leaving a legacy as one of the founders of the field of strategic management, Ansoff created a distinctive thinking on strategic management. Surprisingly, however, only his early work continues to be referenced. He wrote the influential book Corporate Strategy in 1965 and after teaching at Carnegie and becoming the founding Dean of the Vanderbilt School of Business, Igor Ansoff spent about 15 years in Europe teaching and consulting. Subsequently, the US academia "forgot" Ansoff and, continues to cite his early work. Although his early work was conceptually groundbreaking at the time, his later work, which included empirical evidence, went largely unnoticed in the academia. Even [4] Ansoff (1998) suggested that his later work was more relevant than his 1965 book. Moreover, his interests were more in the consulting world, which left the academic setting with an "Ansoffian" gap. Ansoff was labelled as part of the "planning" school (Table IV [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]) of thought in the field of strategy. However, his later work strongly suggests that his ideas are much more comprehensive ([2] Al-Hadramy, 1992; [58] Hatziantoniou, 1986; [62] Jaja, 1989; [67] Lewis, 1989; [99] Salameh, 1987; [84] Mitiku, 1992; [112] van der Velten, 1997; [16], [15] Ansoff and Sullivan, 1993a, b).
Historically, there are many competing theories in the field of strategy ([26] Barnard, 1938; [61] Hofer and Schendel, 1978; [68] Lindblom, 1959; [69] March and Simon, 1958; [33] Burns and Stalker, 1961; [54] Emery and Trist, 1965; [78] Mintzberg, 1973; [96] Quinn, 1978) leading to a diversity of strategy-making typologies ([29] Bourgeois and Brodwin, 1984; [36] Chaffee, 1985; [79] Mintzberg, 1978; [87] Nonaka, 1988). Moreover, empirical work ([76] Miller and Cardinal, 1994; [101] Schwenk and Schrader, 1993; [55] Fredrickson...