Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent : Strategic processes in small and medium sized Swedish companies in the IT-industry

Background: SMEs are extremely important to the Swedish economy. But only 56% of the newly started companies in Sweden are still active three years after they start. One of the most important reasons for this happens in the strategic field which generally includes two issues- one is the applying strategy, another is the strategy process itself. The authors of this paper attach their importance into one of these two issues-strategy process and want to get the result if Mintzberg & Waters’ (1985) strategic process model is suited with Swedish IT-SMEs. Purpose: According to Karl Popper, people have to continuous try to falsify a hypotheses and each time you fail to do this the hypotheses or theories become stronger. If you succeed in falsifying the hypotheses it can be rejected as false and a new and better one will have to be created from the outcome of all these tests. Based on this kind of thought, our research chooses Swedish IT-SMEs to test Mintzberg & Waters’ (1985) model. After all, Mintzberg & Waters’ (1985) model has been put forward almost twenty years and furthermore, its standpoint is mostly based on the big enterprises. Our purpose is to see if this model is suited with the process of strategy of the three-premise (Swedish, IT, SME) companies. Result: We can say after getting the result, that Mintzberg & Waters’ (1985) model is suited with Swedish IT-SME, the model itself becomes stronger