Project strategy: strategy types and their contents in innovation projects

Purpose – Previous literature on project strategy has adopted the narrow view that a project is to be conducted under the governance of a single strong sponsor or parent organization. The purpose of this study is to provide a critical analysis on prior project management (PM) literature addressing different context‐specific strategies of single projects. Design/methodology/approach – Literature analysis. Findings – There are two important determinants in the project's context that affect the strategy of a single project: a project's autonomy in its environment and the complexity of project's stakeholder environment. Based on these two determinants, we characterize four types of alternative positions that projects can have in their context: parent's subordinate and autonomous projects that occur in a stakeholder environment that is not complex, and projects with weak and autonomous positions in a complex stakeholder environment. The developed project strategy framework is applied in the context of innovation projects. The analysis results include strategy contents for different types of innovation projects in terms of the project's direction and success. Research limitations/implications – This study contributes to PM research by broadening the focus from mere tactical‐level projects towards projects as strategic entities, and by suggesting the management of projects differently in different contexts. Further, theoretical and empirical research is proposed on both testing the suggested framework and elaborating it for different project types. Originality/value – The paper opens up avenues towards the development of new and context‐specific PM bodies of knowledge.