Navigating Companies through the Jungle of Emerging Digital Technology Strategies

Between 2010 and 2020 numerous strategic approaches that deal with digital technologies including IoT, AI and Big Data emerged. These approaches contain aspects that can be associated with existing strategy schools of thought. This article analyses 84 relevant publications and identifies the prevailing strategy schools throughout these publications. Our research is based on a semi-structured literature review and a deductive coding approach. The findings show that aspects from deliberate as well as emergent strategy schools are present and combined within the analysed publications. Our insights provide executives a clear overview of the prevailing strategic schools that researchers and practitioners have drawn on. This should enable them to trace these approaches back to the fundamental thoughts of the underlying strategy schools in order to gain a more fundamental understanding of potential aspects they may want to include in their own strategy for digital technologies.