New Challenges for Collaborative Control (original) (raw)

A brief glance at the evolution of strategic focus reveals dramatic shifts in relevant context with potent implications for organization and control, rooted in the reversal of a century-old “long wave { XE "long wave "} ” centered on internalizing various economic activities to control them that gave rise to the integrated firm, the corporation and the conglomerate (Chandler, 1977; Chandler & Salsbury, 1974). Where companies from the mid-1860s to roughly the 1980s created strategic advantage by internalizing activities for greater stability, efficiency and control, increasingly since then advantage has centered more and faster learning and innovation (IBM { XE "IBM "}_Global_Services, 2006; Prahalad & Krishnan, 2008; Schramm, 2006). But no company can control all the resources needed for innovation (Prahalad & Krishnan, 2008), so creating strategic advantage has increasingly required collaborative, outsourced, strategic alliances