CONCEPT
Strategic Intent
Prahalad and Hamel's name for an ambitious, long-term goal that stretches the organization beyond its current capabilities and demands the systematic development of capabilities it does not yet possess — the opposite of a plan.
Strategic intent is the concept Prahalad and Hamel introduced in a 1989 Harvard Business Review article to distinguish genuine strategic thinking from strategic planning. A plan specifies the path to a known destination. Strategic intent specifies a destination so ambitious that the path cannot be known in advance — it must be discovered through the sustained development of capabilities the organization does not yet possess. Canon's intent to beat Xerox. Komatsu's intent to encircle Caterpillar. NEC's intent to converge computing and communications. These intents were deliberately unreasonable. They described futures that could not be reached from the organization's current position through incremental improvement.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The AI age requires strategic intent of unprecedented ambition. Not the intent to use AI to do existing work more cheaply — that is operational effectiveness, not strategy. But the intent to use AI-augmented teams to enter markets previously unreachable, to create products previously inconceivable, to serve populations previously