In the 1960's, the economist Philip Kotler changed the perception of marketing. He described what marketing is rather than what marketers do, thereby changing marketing from a departmental specialisation into a corporate wide doctrine. For Kotler, marketing was a 'social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating...

In the mid-1980s, Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School developed a framework to assess the competitiveness of regions, states and nations.In the early 1980s, U.S. industry saw its economic competitiveness eroded by Japanese and European competitors. Porter concluded that classical international trade theories, which mainly focused...

Michael Porter's innovative research in the 1980's changed managers' perceptions of their own industry's importance as a factor for their company's strategy. Business unit managers would now have to study their industry's characteristics since an industry's structure determines its relative economic attractiveness and hence, the profit potential of all companies...

In the 1960's, MIT developed System Dynamics as an offshoot of the broader discipline of Systems Thinking. Systems Thinking detected structures underling complex problems and allowed individuals to become aware of the mental models they used to perceive reality. System Dynamics simulated interactions between objects in dynamic systems...