پروژه های سرمایه گذاری به عنوان یک سرمایه گذاری شرکت های بزرگ داخلی

A capital investment project exhibits both deliberate and emergent strategic elements. The emergent strategic elements have been conceptualized as a project strategy, which is formed in a project to attain business-oriented results and to cope with organizational and market environments. We use corporate venturing literature to explain the formation of the strategy of an individual project. In the project studies that consider the deliberate strategic elements with projects, a project has been explained to solely implement the strategy of its parent organization: This paper addresses the relationship between a project and its parent and explains how the dimensions of the parent-project relationship affect the formation of a project's strategy which may diverge from the intended strategy of the parent. The empirical study is a case study on four investments projects in Neste Oil, a firm operating in the oil refining industry. The projects have a degree of autonomy in relation to the parent, depending on their relatedness to the existing capabilities of the parent.

Companies organize in projects in order to adapt to a dynamic environment. The dynamism is caused, among others things, by rapid technological development and changes in the market (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997 and Morris, 1994). Project form of organizing increases organizational flexibility, decentralization of management responsibility, provides opportunities for development and allows organizations to adapt to the environment in an evolutionary way (Lindkvist, 2008). Projects may be used to exploit established resources and capabilities to deliver certain business outcomes (Cova et al., 1994), to explore new ways of developing competitiveness or renewing business (Loch, 2000) by venturing into new markets or exploring new technologies (Frederiksen and Davies, 2008). Projects are undertaken to meet current customer needs as base projects, whereas base-moving projects are novel initiatives to search, discover and asses new market opportunities, consider new technologies (Brady and Davies, 2004 and Frederiksen and Davies, 2008), or invest in identified market opportunities (Söderlund and Tell, 2011). Organizations carry out capital investment projects as internal development projects to assemble the facilities that allow them to meet and/or even renew their strategic objectives (Bower, 1986 and Bower, 2005) and develop their products and processes (Hayes et al., 1988). The inherent flexibility and adaptation in the project business suggest that projects are not only used for implementing deliberate strategic plans, but are also emergent strategies that arise from adaptation to the environment are present (Lampel, 2011 and Schwab and Miner, 2011). However the project management literature has emphasized the rational aspects of strategy making considering projects as tools for implementing strategy of the parent, guided by parent organization's plans and operating within pre-established constraints of time, cost, and specification (Morris and Jamieson, 2005 and Shenhar, 2004). Existing literature on project strategy typically assumes that the project is subordinate to a single parent firm (Morris and Jamieson, 2004 and Shenhar et al., 2005). This perspective emphasizes project selection, and therefore the managerial focus of the organizations has shifted towards multiproject management and the effective linking of this set of projects to the ultimate business purpose (Artto and Dietrich, 2004). Accordingly, project strategy is then a part of a strategy of the parent without emergent elements. Increasingly, the role of project management in shaping the front end and in linking with the parents’ strategies is being recognized (Morris, 1994 and Morris, 2009). Emergent elements of strategy in project the context have been discussed for example in the field of strategy process (Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985) and venturing (Burgelman, 1983 and Burgelman, 1985). Mintzberg (1978) separates intended and realized strategies, where realized strategies contain both deliberate and emergent elements. Already Ansoff (1987) explains that the more complex and distributed the actions of a company are, the more the realized results will diverge from the planned outcome. In a complex environment with multiple stakeholders, the project strategy of an autonomous project may, to some extent, be established by the project itself, as a function of how the project defines its success criteria, and how the project perceives its context (Artto et al., 2008). In the field of product and process development (Wheelwright and Clark, 1992) projects are discussed as ventures (Abetti, 1997, Burgelman, 1983 and Maine, 2008). In this paper we discuss capital investment projects and their relationship to the parent organization in a similar setting as new product and process development projects have been discussed, acknowledging both the top-down rational strategy implementation by parent and bottom-up emerging strategy in projects and the venture-like nature of an investment projects. We analyze the relationship between a capital investment project and its parent organization to find out the dimensions of that relationship that have an effect on the formation of an individual strategy of the investment project. The research questions are: RQ 1: What are the dimensions of the relationship between a capital investment project and its parent? RQ 2: What are the elements of the strategy of a capital investment project? We use the literatures of project strategy and internal corporate venturing to address the venture-like content and strategy of an investment project, and the relationship between the project and its parent. In the empirical study, we examine a parent organization and four different capital investment projects of the parent, which each had different strategic emphases and therefore various effects on the parent, despite the fact that their strategic goals are aligned with the strategy of the parent organization.

A capital investment project exhibits both deliberate and emergent strategic elements. The emergent strategic elements have been conceptualized as an individual project strategy, which may diverge from the intended strategy of project's parent organization. We found that the strategy of an investment project cannot be reduced to conforming to time, cost and scope, as first and foremost they have to deliver business-oriented results and operate both in organizational and market environments. A diverging strategy for an investment project can lead to the development of new capabilities and thus allow strategic renewal of the parent organization. We explain the formation of the individual strategies of projects through the relationship between an investment project and its parent. Individual strategies are formed in projects that are to some extent autonomous with relation to its parent organization. The need for autonomy is dependent on the degree of relatedness of the investment project: related projects can utilize existing capabilities and resources of a parent organization, and thus they are easier to manage, and they are also more likely to deliver the intended strategy of the parent organization. Investment projects with a low level of relatedness require autonomy, as they cannot rely on existing capabilities and resources, but they have to form new ones to answer to the requirements set by organization and market environment. The parent needs to recognize the degree of relatedness of an investment project, and grant the project the degree of autonomy it needs to deliver business-oriented end results. The results of this paper suggest that an investment project and its strategy can be analyzed by regarding a project as a venture. This opens new theoretical avenues in the development of novel approaches for business-focused projects and their management. The novelty is partly in building a link between the practice-oriented discourse of project management and the discourse of internal corporate venturing, and using the extant venturing literature in studying the strategic management of projects. Approaches that would integrate venturing and project management conceptually or through empirical research in for example the investment project context are scarce in the current research. We welcome theoretical and empirical research in the area of analyzing projects and their strategies through venturing discourse. In particular, we see that the creation of the long-term business performance within an individual project's context and the analysis of project as a business actor with an individual strategy to survive in its internal and external business environment are relevant perspectives. We also foresee that the corporate venturing discourse would lead the research towards a broader theoretical field of entrepreneurship, and ultimately towards a more specific theme of considering a project manager an entrepreneur.