Strategic change is a priority for firms and thus fundamental to management and strategy. There are debates regarding whether or not firms that make strategic changes perform better than those that do not. According to the Attention-Based View (ABV) , decision-making is guided by selective attention to organizational issues and initiatives, which could lead to a strategic change at a firm. In this research, strategic attention is defined as the allocation of decisions that executives want to achieve and plan based on their executive attention. As a result, this research examines how paying strategic attention to different categories of issues can affect strategic changes and then how strategic change will influence firm performance. This study proposes that a firm’s strategic attention to external environments leads to its strategic change in external environments, and then the strategic change leads to the firm's improvement in performance. Studying two external environments: technological and regulation environments, this study finds the major premise supported. Specifically, the increase in a firm’s strategic attention to technological environments enhances the firm’s strategic change in AI patenting and then the increase in AI patents improve the firm performance. Similarly, the increase in a firm’s strategic attention to regulation environments enhances the firm’s strategic changes in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and then the strategic change in greenhouse gas emissions improves the firm performance. With these findings, this study contributes in several key ways by showing that strategic attention is the antecedent of strategic change and firm performance is the consequence of strategic change.

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