This editorial introduces a special issue of Strategic Change devoted to the intellectual legacy of Professor H. Igor Ansoff (1918–2002). The issue brings together historical, empirical, and conceptual contributions that reassess Ansoff's role in the emergence of strategic management and examine the continuing relevance of his ideas for contemporary strategic challenges. Post–World War II, the US Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress renewed antitrust enforcement against large multinationals and conglomerates. These efforts extended an earlier challenge to the economic and political power of big corporations, often described as the war on bigness (Fligstein 1990; Wu 2018). Large firms were increasingly portrayed as entrenched and privileged, creating pressure for new managerial ideas that could justify scale, growth, and diversification. This pressure helped give rise to long-range planning as a distinct field of inquiry and practice. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation served as an early field laboratory. Robert Franklin Stewart led a small team of experts from the military and government to build a master plan for the firm. Between 1952 and 1957 they produced three generations of the Lockheed Master Plan (Stewart and Lipp 1963). After the launch of LMP II in 1955, Stewart started to work on a unified body of knowledge and skills for corporate planning. In 1957, H. Igor Ansoff, a project manager from RAND, was hired to work on external diversification. Parallel efforts emerged at the Stanford Research Institute, where the Long Range Planning Service (LRPS) institutionalized planning knowledge across major corporations. Charter members included Ford Motor Company, General Electric Company, International Business Machines, Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, and Shell Chemical Company. Ansoff was already embedded in this network, working closely with SRI staff while still at Lockheed. This positioned him at the center of an emerging community that translated planning practice into a shared managerial language. The guest editors of this special issue (2025) interviewed Professor Henry Mintzberg on his recollections about H. Igor Ansoff, reflecting on four key encounters throughout their professional lives (Puyt and Antoniou 2025). Mintzberg speaks of Ansoff with sustained admiration and reflects on the personal, institutional, and theoretical intersections that shaped their careers. Readers will learn that the so-called “Mintzberg-Ansoff debate” probably never will be resolved, even though some have tried (Foss et al. 2022; Moussetis 2011). Mintzberg's conceptual framework: 10 schools of thought on strategy formation (Mintzberg 1990; Mintzberg et al. 1998) can be read as an attempt to construct an overarching theory of strategic management. He noted that he initially wanted to generalize Ansoff's book as the basis of his PhD research. Ansoff adopted a different orientation. He stressed historical accuracy (Ansoff 1991) and the empirical validation of strategic concepts in practice (Ansoff et al. 1993; Ansoff and Sullivan 1993). Kieser captures this divide succinctly: “Sociologists, and among them sociologists of organization, favor grand theories and do not want to bother too much about historical details that discomfort these theories, while historians fundamentally distrust grand theories” (Kieser 1994, 612). This tension also clarifies why Mintzberg brought up the Honda (A) case from Harvard in the interview. The case served to refine and align competing theories within his conceptual framework (Mintzberg 1994; Mintzberg and Lampel 1999). The Ansoff Archive (Puyt et al. 2024) collects artifacts and previously unknown publications from around the world. Finn Birger Lie, the custodian of the private Theory and Practice of Planning (TAPP) archive, shares a historical LRPS report by Ansoff and Stewart (1967) to commemorate this special issue. The report marks an early moment in the debate on the future of corporate planning. In his paper, Lie (2025) surfaces archival material to trace this microhistory in strategic management. He shows how the holistic school of strategic management took shape and how Ansoff's thinking was shaped by working within a small network of influential thinkers. Ansoff (1965) is still considered the cornerstone of Ansoff's legacy. Zupic et al. (2025) provide the first systematic, data-driven assessment of its influence, combining topic modeling, citation context analysis, and historiography. Their study maps how Ansoff's concepts diffused through the field, which ideas endured, and which remained underdeveloped. The paper clarifies Ansoff's lasting impact and identifies gaps that invite renewed empirical work. Ansoff's Strategic Success Hypothesis or Paradigm (SSH) anchors this special issue. Vracheva and Moussetis (2025) position SSH as a diagnostic framework linking strategic behavior, capabilities, and environmental turbulence. Unlike many contemporary tools that address these elements in isolation, SSH offers an integrated logic for strategic alignment under high uncertainty. Its strength lies in diagnosis rather than execution, making it complementary to agility and dynamic capability approaches. In a similar vein, Hristova (2025) tests SSH empirically using two waves of firm-level data from Bulgaria. The results are consistent across time. Strategic planning is more widely used and is associated with stronger performance, even after controlling for contextual factors. Alignment between strategy, capability, and environmental conditions predicts outcomes in both periods. The findings reinforce Ansoff's core logic and demonstrate its continued empirical validity. Antoniou and Park (2025) revisit Ansoff's diagnostic tools in contemporary volatile environments. Focusing on environmental turbulence, strategic issue management, and growth vectors, they show how Ansoff's instruments support disciplined adaptation in both private and public organizations. While some assumptions limit their direct application in small or loosely structured firms, the authors demonstrate that Ansoff's structured approach continues to be practically useful when applied with contextual judgment. Ansoff came from a great line passing through Machiavelli and Sun Tzu (The Economist 2008). In their systematic literature review, Hortega et al. (2025) examine how Ansoff's work evolved within the literature. Reviewing 116 publications, they show a shift from theory building toward pedagogy and applied case work. The Ansoff Matrix remains widely used, yet most studies are conceptual rather than empirical. The authors argue that Ansoff's frameworks endure less as strict prescriptions and more as stable cognitive scaffolding for strategic reasoning. Park and Antoniou (2025) extend Ansoff's architecture into a meta-strategic framework suited to platform-based and ecosystem-driven competition. They incorporate industry architecture, platform dynamics, and distributed capabilities to show how strategic advantage increasingly depends on structural positions within networks. The framework offers a basis for strategy design under conditions of radical uncertainty. While Ansoff is considered to be the father of strategic management, younger generations don't seem to recognize his name. Madsen (2025) addresses Ansoff's declining visibility among younger scholars. Using an institutional perspective, the paper explains this shift through changes in rhetoric, pedagogy, and epistemic norms rather than through weaknesses in Ansoff's ideas. The analysis shows how strategic concepts rise, stabilize, and persist in reduced form, highlighting the field's selective memory. Finally, Puyt (2025) reconstructs Ansoff's complete body of work by cross-referencing existing bibliographies with newly uncovered archival material. Much of this work circulated outside journals or lacked proper attribution. By restoring these sources, the paper shows that Ansoff's contribution is broader and more influential than the established record suggests. The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that governments rely more than ever on big food, big pharma, and big tech to drive and deliver innovations addressing societal challenges. This reliance carries costs (Bonotti and Zech 2021; Cutler and Summers 2020; Fairbairn and Reisman 2024; Liedtke and Associated Press 2024) and shapes daily political tradeoffs. Its effects extend beyond economic and political power and reach into contemporary issues such as election interference, information manipulation by large tech firms, and commercial pressures on free speech (Fukuyama et al. 2021; Lamoreaux 2019; Menon 2024). The papers in this special issue show why Ansoff's ideas still matter. They do not solve all the structural problems in the field of strategic management, but they open the door for realistic, evidence-driven research. The agenda below follows from the contributions and aligns with current scholarship. The early corporate-planning pioneers developed and tested tools in practice. Strategic management later shifted toward theory building to gain academic legitimacy (Bower 1982; Hambrick 2007; Hambrick and Chen 2008) and lost much of its applied discipline (Drnevich et al. 2020). As a consequence, many modern strategy frameworks remain untested. Some constructs survive through citation rather than independent validation or historical context (Bergh et al. 2017; Hambrick 2004; Puyt et al. 2025). The papers by Vracheva and Moussetis, Hristova, and Antoniou and Park show a path forward: start with an applied problem, run the analysis, compare outcomes, and refine the theory. The 20th-century antitrust movement that produced long-range planning lost momentum. The Chicago School discouraged public spending on limiting corporate concentration (Bork 1978; Friedman 1962). Monopolies and oligopolies were celebrated as market success as long as prices stayed low for consumers. US policy effectively ended the war on bigness. Today, multinationals operate like quasi-states, leveraging diplomatic strategies, economic influence, and political lobbying to shape global policies and secure favorable conditions for their operations, much like sovereign governments maneuver in international relations (Bollerman 2025; Galloway 2020; Matala and Stutz 2025). Digital platforms, global infrastructures, and quasi-sovereign firms shape markets (Sadraei et al. 2025). These conditions resemble the environmental turbulence Ansoff anticipated. The paper by Park and Antoniou outlines the architecture of this new ecosystem, which is ready for empirical testing. The field of strategic management suffers from weak epistemic hygiene. Good ideas fade when institutional support weakens. Bad theories accumulate when no system removes them (Aguinis et al. 2024; Block et al. 2023). AI systems now ingest the full scholarly archive, including the untested parts found online. This magnifies the problem. Current debates about AI hallucinations misdiagnose this problem (Gallegos et al. 2024). The deeper issue is epistemic inheritance. These models train on decades of management research that lacks systematic pruning, replication, or falsification. This weakness compounds. As a result, AI systems reproduce and amplify unresolved theoretical claims rather than correcting them. The field has not yet confronted this problem systematically. Bibliometric mapping, concept diffusion studies, and archival reconstructions, as developed by Zupic et al., Madsen, and recent work using the Ansoff Archive, provide the necessary starting tools. This agenda aligns with the evidence in the special issue. It does not aspire to rebuild the whole field of strategic management. It shows how revisiting Ansoff's empirical mindset opens concrete research paths. The direction is simple: test tools, study alignment, follow ideas through practice, and reconnect strategy research with real managerial problems. The guest editors sincerely thank Iacopo Cavallini, David Collins, Catherine Levitt, Ting-Hsiu Liao, Stefan Heusinkveld, Petra Kugler, Tamer Tamer Salameh, Kurt Verweire, and the authors who contributed their time, expertise, and constructive feedback to this special issue. Their careful evaluations and thoughtful suggestions have greatly enhanced the quality and rigor of the papers included. We are grateful for their dedication to advancing research in strategic management and for supporting the scholarly community through this critical peer-review process. The authors used ChatGPT-5 and Grammarly Premium to edit and refine the manuscript's language, style, and structure. The authors have reviewed and edited the output and take full responsibility for the content of this manuscript. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Puyt et al. (Fri,) studied this question.