I came to strategy as a political scientist.

My doctorate is from the European University Institute in Florence, by way of the London School of Economics, and my postdoctoral research project in the mid-1990s examined Europe’s deregulating airline industry, where upstarts like Ryanair were using new rules to take apart old incumbents. That early Ryanair work appeared in Long Range Planning in 1999, and since 2022 I have been the journal’s Co-Editor-in-Chief. In between were two decades of work on business model innovation and what scholars call nonmarket strategy, the configurations and activities through which firms strategically manage their political and social environments.

The 1999 paper (“The limits of price leadership”) is still the through-line: advantage is won where market position and the political ground meet.