The Benefits of a Coherent Strategy for Innovation and Corporate Change: A Study Applying Miles and Snow's Model in the Context of Small Firms

The literature on strategy has focused a great deal of attention in the quest for a taxonomy of generic strategies (Hatten & Schendel, 1977; Herbert & Deresky, 1987; and Miller & Dess, 1993). A generic strategy can be seen as a broad categorisation of strategic choices with ample applicability across industries and organisational forms (Herbert & Deresky, 1987). On this study, the model proposed by Miles and Snow (1978) was adopted to describe small firms’ competitive strategies. Miles and Snow have produced a typology of competitive strategies. Miles and Snow proposed that firms in general develop relatively stable patterns of strategic behaviour in order to accomplish a good alignment with perceived environmental conditions. Their typology involves four strategic types: defenders, prospectors, analysers and reactors. Data were collected with a sample of 150 Brazilian small firms’ owner‐managers using a questionnaire adapted from Conant, Mokwa and Varadarajan (1990). Competitive strategies identified in this study gave additional evidence in support of Miles and Snow’s model of existence of four types of generic strategies in a competitive environment composed mainly of small firms.