Patterns in the Diffusion of Strategies Across Organizations: Insights from the Innovation Diffusion Literature

Firms often adopt strategies in spite of mixed evidence about the strategy's performance and of evidence that the strategy leads to inefficient outcomes. Here, we describe the conditions prompting the spread of inefficient strategies through a population of firms, as well as the characteristics of individual firms that affect their propensity to adopt efficient and inefficient strategies. We focus on one pattern that appears common to strategic...