Organizational Management and Strategic Behaviour

Context: Relevance And Determinism

In current times, the orientation to service industries has reached an exponential growth and development, with an unprecedented optimization triggered by big data analytics software applications and artificial intelligence powerful algorithms. Thus, the uprise of the tertiary sector has inevitably transformed the primary and secondary sectors towards a second economy comprised of a 4^th industrial revolution (4IR) also known as the Industry 4.0, interconnecting the real and digital world. The prior has shaped the factory production and the transactional industries for the future.

Hence, a growing number of companies in the secondary sector have adhered to “cobotization” (as a human-robot interaction´s phenomenon at the workplace of co-working and sharing of activities) or even transformed production into full robotized units. Production became also gradually a commonly dispersed global activity. Grant (2021) provides a good example of the such globally-dispersed production by described in his book the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft model, in which, several of its parts being nowadays produced all over the world; for instance, the central fuselage (in Italy); the forward fuselage (in Japan and USA); the escape slides (in USA); the raked wing tips (in South Korea); the electric brakes and landing gear (in France); the cargo doors (Sweden) or the flight deck seats (in UK). So, one may wonder (specially the buyer) were thus my purchased product comes from? Yes, the business realm is more sophisticated and intertwined than ever before, and the current paradigm of supply-demand balance across industries only increases the pressure on industry (or better said) intra-industry competition, in which, typically production life-cycles assist a downward trend in time, such as the (lead) time on post-launching phase of the product with early-imitators/followers being able to copy and replicate ideas and products at a faster pace.

Companies eager to subsist, grow and to become a dominant incumbent or a sustainable firm have developed furthermore methodologies towards process innovation tools, in addition to product-innovations, focused on the operation’s continuous improvement and on their supply chains, but also, on transactional and reporting systems, with added apparatus on business intelligence, and even, idealized new strategic innovations as to their business models adopting a multiplicity of options, for example, the freemium, meter-based; razor-and-blade, blue ocean and so forth).