The missing framework

Thesis Series #8

I began my PhD with a simple proposition:

Firms that align their strategy with external drivers of transformation can achieve market dominance.

To test this, two questions had to be answered in sequence:

First, what does market dominance actually mean, and how can it be measured rigorously across firms and over time?

Second, what are the external drivers of transformation that firms are expected to align with?

My recent posts focused on the first question. This next series focuses on the second.

I assumed that a clear, widely accepted framework of external drivers already existed.

It didn't.

Instead, the literature is fragmented. Terms such as megatrends, disruptive innovation, creative destruction, and paradigm shifts are used inconsistently and often interchangeably. They point to real phenomena, but they lack shared definitions, a common unit of analysis, and an agreed structure.

This creates three problems.

1) Conceptual ambiguity, where distinct forces are blurred together under loose labels.

2) Analytical weakness, where drivers are studied in isolation without a framework that shows how they relate to one another.

3) Strategic failure, where leaders struggle to translate abstract change into concrete strategic choices.

The root cause is straightforward. There is no commonly used driver construct and no comprehensive framework that spans both concrete forces and more abstract systemic change.

That gap became the focus of my second research paper, and the most demanding part of my PhD.

What it produced was a structured driver framework grounded in forty years of academic research, designed to make external transformation legible, comparable, and usable for strategy.

It will take several posts to explain it properly.

I will start tomorrow.

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