Brief History
The principal purpose of
analysis for strategic
planning is to identify the
major opportunities and
threats a business unit
faces in the future and to
identify the skills around
which it can develop a
strategic intelligence plan to exploit the
opportunities and negotiate
around the threats. Hofer
and Schendel felt that the
major weakness with the
General Electric business
screen was that it didn’t
effectively depict the
positions of new businesses
that are just starting to
grow in new industries. They
suggested in 1975 that
changes in basic competitive
positions are easier to
accomplish at certain stages
in the evolution of an
industry than others. The
Boston Consulting Group also
alluded to this with their
assumption that market
growth was related to life
cycle and was used as the
one axis on their matrix.
The competitive position /
market evolution matrix was
developed in the late 1970s
by Charles W. Hofer and Dan
Schendel.
