Call for papers: Strategy Transformation in Corporations

A special issue of International Journal of Technology Management

Needless to say, high-tech corporations have to perpetually create new products and services and novel business models in order to maintain a competitive edge and ensure their continued growth. In particular, revamping conventional products and services radically and creating new business models that transform existing business rules are triggers that have led to profound strategy transformations in the history of large traditional companies. For example, new value chains were created across the ITC industry with Apple’s development of its music distribution businesses in America (iPod & iTunes), the development of the smartphone (iPhone) and so on.

A battery of academic research in recent years has dealt with radical innovation, breakthrough innovation, discontinuous innovation and disruptive innovation, and has identified the challenges that companies face with strategy transformation as they strive to pioneer new markets and create new technologies, the difficulties that accompany these transformations, and factors that lead to success or failure. There have been plenty of reported cases of large traditional companies in a number of different areas such as the PC market, digital photography, disk drives, semiconductor exposure apparatus, clock industries and so forth, whose business performance and viability were profoundly impacted because they were unable to respond to changing circumstances. The recent decline of Kodak is an example of this.

Therefore, the most important thing for any company is to acquire organisational capabilities that encourage the development of new technologies and businesses that can respond swiftly in fluctuating environments. Radical innovation and breakthrough innovation trigger paradigm shifts with their new markets and new technologies, and lead to greatly enhanced product functionality while fundamentally altering existing markets – and even create new ones, which result in dramatic shifts in existing corporate strategies.

Radical innovation is fundamentally different to the old incremental innovation in which companies become path-dependent, and requires new knowledge which is different from existing skills and know-how for its realisation.

Therefore, companies dealing with radical innovation must face uncertain and discontinuous markets, technologies, organisations and resources, and although some of them are able to overcome these challenges and win out, there is a serious risk that a great many of them will stall and fail. To achieve strategy transformation with radical innovation, companies need capabilities (strategic, organisational, resource, technology, operational and leadership factors) that are different from the knowledge they have used to foster their incremental innovations of the past.

To better understand this new radical innovation paradigm in high-tech corporations around the world, this special issue aims to collect a set of high-quality papers investigating these corporate strategy transformations, and the various dimensions within them, as described below.

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Strategy transformation through radical innovation
• Strategy-making processes towards strategy transformation
• Change management for strategy transformation
• Business factors and issues that promote or obstruct strategy transformation
• Decision-making processes for strategy transformation - timing and issues
• Corporate reform processes towards strategy transformation
• Operational management and organisational systems to achieve strategy transformation
• Marketing management to achieve strategy transformation
• Project management to achieve strategy transformation
• Striking a balance between exploitation and exploration for strategy transformation
• The roles and effects of external R&D collaborations in strategy transformation
• The roles and effects of mergers and acquisitions in strategy transformation
• Global innovation collaborations for strategy transformation
• The role of key technology generation and radical innovation in strategy transformation
• R&D management for strategy transformation: its interaction with corporate strategy, technology and planning; its interface with production and marketing; managing worldwide R&D systems
• The knowledge creation process and strategy transformation for radical innovation

Important Dates
Submission deadline for abstract (optional): 31 January, 2013
Submission deadline for full papers: 31 August, 2013
Notification of acceptance: 31 October, 2013
Submission deadline for final version: 31 December, 2013