Title: Corporate portfolio management applications: role of firm characteristics and impact on corporate processes

Authors: Robert Untiedt; Ulrich Pidun

Addresses: Faculty of Business Administration, Freiberg University, D-09596 Freiberg, Germany ' The Boston Consulting Group GmbH, 60322 Frankfurt, Germany

Abstract: Corporate portfolio management (CPM) approaches emerged over 40 years ago in response to the rise of large corporations with diversified portfolios of partly unrelated business units. Their initial purpose and main application area was to support corporate management in defining the boundaries of a firm, allocating resources and assigning specific roles and targets for each business unit. Today, CPM is still regarded as highly relevant, but little is known about the application of CPM instruments in corporate practise. Based on a survey among 196 executives of the largest companies worldwide, we identified three distinct CPM user-types: corporate developers, business unit steerers and passive portfolio managers. These CPM application patterns are traced back to a set of distinct company characteristics. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the CPM user type has a significant influence on the characteristics of the implemented CPM processes and on the integration of CPM with other corporate processes.

Keywords: corporate portfolio management; CPM; strategic planning; applications; application clusters; firm characteristics; corporate processes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMS.2013.051636

International Journal of Applied Management Science, 2013 Vol.5 No.1, pp.1 - 21

Published online: 30 Jan 2014 *

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