ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some examples of some longer stories, where strings of strategies are deployed and players come and go. It illustrates how the dominant strategy in a sector changes over time and explores how actors deploy a range of strategies in an ecosystem. The chapter looks at how organisational identity 'remembers' and reuses preferred strategies, irrespective of whether these are the best choice for the context and the structural coupling. Geoffrey Moore identified a repeating pattern of adoption of new technology in his very successful series of books on the subject that have become a cornerstone of strategy for IT firms. A large organisation that has historically been able to dominate by strength would find it hard to deliver a strategy of competing through nimbleness and speed. Supersonic flight was already being talked about in the 1950s, in parallel with the developments of the Comet and the 707, though there were substantial design challenges to overcome.
