Ambitious Vision and Micro-Radical Innovations: The Beginning of Strategic Intent in Tunisia

The essence of the strategy is not to adopt key factors of success in an industry, but to have a strong will to refrain the habitual patterns, to redefine the borders and to reform the rules to obtain the advantages. This behaviour characterised the Japanese firms that have successfully managed to stay ahead of the American companies in the 1990s. This was followed up by radical technological innovations for achieving core competencies. The strategic intent corresponded to an ambitious vision, generating the changes and the destabilisation of the existing competitive dynamics. A willingness to define a strategic intent has also been demonstrated by the firms in developing countries like Tunisia. The objective of this case study is twofold: first, it determines the intensity of technological innovations adopted, patented as well as commercialised on an international scale by innovative Tunisian companies. Second, it explicates the nature of strategic behaviour of those innovative Tunisian companies, having an ambitious vision. Consequently, this case study exhibits the determinants of strategic intent in emerging countries. A Tunisian company, Sopal, which is founded in 1988 and manufacturing the brass items, has been chosen for a case study. This case study is based on secondary as well as primary data. The secondary data were collected through the sources viz. books, scholarly research journals, website of professional bodies etc., while the interview with the managers of Tunisian companies has been conducted to accumulate the primary data.