2022 Volume 21 Issue 3 Pages 89-104
In corporate management, it is necessary to balance the need to maintain and utilize accumulated experience with the need to make changes. It is important for the long-term survival of a company that management takes the initiative to innovate existing businesses and launch new businesses while utilizing accumulated technologies and brands. This paper considers these changes in resource allocation as strategic change and examines how the history and experience of the company’s existing businesses and the perceptions of the decision makers affect it. We studied distilleries operated by three companies with different backgrounds in the Japanese whiskey business. It revealed that in each case, while the history of activities in the existing business had a common influence on the strategic shift, differences in the perception of the relationship with the existing business led to differences in what the source of identity was and what the company sought to differentiate itself from.
