Situation analysis forecasting: the case of European maritime clusters

Within the literature concerned with aspects of competitiveness, innovation and strategic management of industrial clusters, the body regarding forecasting of strategic management is still nascent. This work aspires to render a contribution within the domain of strategic management forecasting, through the indicative case of European maritime clusters. For this end, a two-tier model is formulated. A quantitative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) methodology that derives from the fusion of a quondam situation analysis and crosstabs’ theory is generated. This leads to the utilization of the crosstab’s conditional probabilities as transition probabilities; the latter are called to compile the transition matrix of a Markov chain. Through this methodology, and the successive Markov chain’s transition matrices, strategic forecasts are extracted for a devised European maritime cluster case. This work relinquishes a novel application with respect to strategic management forecasting, that provides a dichotomy of practical interpretations and scenarios for quantitative situation analysis. Thus, it may enable effective real-time decision-making for strategic management and/or policy drafting. The situation analysis forecasting model may find applicability in a plethora of practical and theoretical cases, wherein forecasting may be desirable. It may as well pertain to an intrinsic methodology for situation analysis forecasting of maritime clusters.