Global collaborative networks strategic: Economist 15-year research report
Stumble It!Foresight 2020 is a new research report (downloadable free) written by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Cisco Systems, assesses likely changes to the global economy, to eight major industries and to corporate structures over the next 15 years.
More than 1,650 senior executives, analysts and policymakers from across the globe took part in a survey and a series of in-depth interviews conducted especially for the report.
The report identifies 3 critical drivers: Globalisation, Demographics and Atomisation.
By Atomisation they identify the strategic importance of global networks and collaboration
"Network technologies and globalisation will enable firms to better use the world as their supply base for talent and materials. Processes, firms, customers and supply chains will fragment as companies expand overseas. As a result, effective collaboration will become more important. The boundaries between different functions, organisations and even industries will blur".
Peter Fryer of Trojanmice identifies some clips from the report to wet your appetite:
- "Knowledge workers will be companies’ most valuable source of competitive advantage in 2020, whether in outward-facing functions such as sales or inward-facing ones such as knowledge management."
- "The focus of management attention will be on the areas of the business, from innovation to customer service, where personal chemistry or creative insight matter more than rules and processes".
- “To be successful, companies have to invest in workers and technologies that can drive collaboration and interactions inside and outside the company across the entire value chain of customers, partners and suppliers.”
Digg | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Yahoo! | 
Add to my favourites
Bioteams Books Reviews
Could cell phones destroy civilisation
"Cell", the new novel by horror writer Stephen King, paints an all too plausible scenario where our addiction to cell phones enables a malicious virus to be pulsed to every phone in the world turning all who take the call into a flock of murderously mad zombies.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related Virtual Collaboration Networks Articles
Management Flight Simulator for Virtual Business Networks
Leading a virtual business network requires different skills than leading a traditional team. Many of these skills are unfortunately very counter-intuitive due to the living, evolving nature of such networks. Discovering this 'on the job' is almost as crazy as training airline pilots without using flight simulators!
Corporate structure: the next step for multinationals
In a new book, From Global to MetaNational, Strategy experts and Insead Professors, Yvez Doz, José Santos and Peter Williamson argue that the future form of successful global enterprise has now changed from the multinational to the metanational.
Making virtual communities and social networks sustainable
Many networks and communities seem to require constant attention from the leaders or facilitators. Its always the same old people who seem to do all the work. Take away the leader, perhaps because the funding runs out, and the community just withers and dies - sometimes within a matter of weeks. Often this happens because the network has not cultivated the 3 critical dialogues in a community: taking care of business, grooming and emoting. These dialogs must take occur across the 3 key network encounters: one-one, one-many and many-many. Heres how you can make your networks and communities less fragile!
Leave a comment