A strategic management framework of tangible and intangible assets

This article is aimed at supporting the management in the strategic planning of investments on critical value drivers, taking into consideration their impact on competitive advantage and the cumulative investments made on them. We describe a framework through a step-by-step procedure. No previous strategic management framework has adopted a holistic approach to the strategic analysis of value drivers. In fact, unlike many other strategic management models, our framework adopts a competitive advantage perspective considering both the wholeness of organizational value drivers and the interdependencies among the value drivers. Managers are asked to make pairwise comparisons that are synthesized through the analytic network process. The outputs of the synthesis are analyzed both qualitatively (synoptic analysis) and quantitatively (Spearman's and Kendall's non-parametric rank correlation coefficients). The analysis of the resulting values turns in useful strategic suggestions for the top management in order to enhance the organizational strategic coherence.