Strategy requires someone with a deep understanding of the subject matter to have an original insight.
The insight has to be original because an advantage has to be defensible: anything everyone else can arrive at is an advantage to no one. This is why the insight can’t come from a model that every competitor also has access to.
And it has to come from deep understanding because insight grows out of context, and the most valuable context is unique, mostly tacit, and relational: it comes from the meeting between a company and the people in it.
This holds even for advantages that don’t look like insight. Network effects, distribution, proprietary data, or a regulatory moat can all be sources of advantage, but someone first has to see that they matter here and how to build them—and that is the original insight.