The Relationship Between Business Strategy and Project Strategy in Innovation Projects

Abstract: This report is a case study with the aim of examining the link between business strategy and the strategy of projects. The field of project management in strategy of projects and their link to the strategy of parent company has yet to be explored. The existing body of literature presents the alignment of project to strategy in two main views which are that projects should have a similar strategy with the parent or that projects should be independent in strategy and follow its own approach. Researchers acknowledge that the limited theoretical frameworks in this stream suffer from the lack of empirical research. Thus this research is based on the question “What is the relation between company’s business strategy and project’s strategy in innovation projects following the position driven alignment approach?” The researchers utilize the position-driven alignment framework as propositioned by Artto, Kujala, Dietrich and Martinsuo (2007). The factors of stakeholder complexity and project autonomy are examined to explore the relationship between the parent strategy and the project strategy. The study conducted is a single case study design on an IT Platform in a large insurance company. Analysis from the data reveal interesting results; that i) The obedience of the project creates risk on the parent strategy, ii) parent strategy changes as the project progresses and that iii) the perception of importance of the project by the parent influences the project autonomy. Further evidence through empirical research is suggested on the other project positions in this framework.