Abstract:

Firms increasingly face competitive pressures related to rapid and continuous adaptation to a complex, dynamic, and highly interconnected global environment. Pressing challenges include keeping pace with shorter product life cycles, incorporating multiple technologies into the design of new products, co-creating products and services with customers and partners, and leveraging the growth of scientific and technical knowledge in many sectors. In response, we observe experimentation with new organization designs that are fundamentally different from existing forms of organizing. We propose that these new designs are based on an actor-oriented architectural scheme composed of three main elements: (1) actors who have the capabilities and values to self-organize, (2) commons where the actors accumulate and share resources, and (3) protocols, processes, and infrastructures that enable multi-actor collaboration. We demonstrate the usefulness of the actor-oriented scheme by applying it to organizations drawn from four different sectors: global professional services, open source software development, computer equipment, and national defense. We discuss the implications of the actor-oriented architectural scheme for future research on organizational forms as well as for managers who are involved in designing organizations.

 

About the speaker:  Charles Snow is the Mellon Foundation Professor of Business Administration in the Smeal College of Business at The Pennsylvania State University. He joined Penn State after receiving a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is well known for co-authoring the classic book Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process (McGraw-Hill, 1978) which presented a model of how organizations adapt to their environments and strategies for adapting effectively (Prospector, Analyzer, and Defender). He also co-authored Fit, Failure, and the Hall of Fame: How Firms Succeed or Fail (Free Press, 1994) and Collaborative Entrepreneurship: How Communities of Networked Firms Use Continuous Innovation to Create Economic Wealth (Stanford University Press, 2005). His research areas are innovation management, organization design, and new organizational forms. He is on the board of Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management,Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Journal of World Business, and other academic journals. He is a Visiting Research Scholar at University of Melbourne. He formed a worldwide community of scholars and firms dedicated to advancing the theory and practice of organization design. He is a golf addict! 

 

 

The seminar will be followed by light lunch