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Call for papers on Collaborative Strategies in the Digital Age

  • 1.  Call for papers on Collaborative Strategies in the Digital Age

    Posted 03-25-2023 06:06
    Call for papers for a special issue of Strategic Management Review
    Collaborative Strategies in the Digital Age
     
    Guest Editors
    Fabrice Lumineau, University of Hong Kong
    Arvind Malhotra, University of North Carolina

    Background

    Collaboration, the organization of joint efforts among actors to achieve a shared goal (Castañer & Oliveira, 2020; Salvato, Reuer, & Battigalli, 2017), is at the heart of the strategic management research agenda. The current digital age – referred to as the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 – is significantly affecting how individuals and organizations collaborate in almost every industry worldwide. The rise of technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchains, Internet of Things, quantum computing, and machine learning influences the volume, variety, and velocity of data available to conduct business. At the same time, technologies like VR/AR/MR – labeled as extended reality – are changing the nature of collaboration between individuals and organizations. Furthermore, the maturity of APIs (application programming interfaces) is leading to open and new forms of collaboration between organizational entities. As Adner, Puranam, and Zhu (2019) recently observed, digital transformation is associated with fundamental qualitative changes; in particular, in terms of representation, connectivity, and aggregation of information. In addition, digitalization supports the removal of traditional bottlenecks and enables scalability; which is a much stronger capability to perform well in times of uncertainty and crisis. Emerging digital technologies enable increasingly sophisticated tasks to be executed algorithmically and are likely to transform the nature of collaborative strategies.

    The set of changes brought about by digital technologies leads us to revisit and rethink the way individuals and organizations collaborate. Digitalization is impacting the structuring, management, and governance of collaborative agreements and, in turn, the tension between cooperation and competition (Hoffmann, Lavie, Reuer, & Shipilov, 2018). The ability to exchange information and collaborate across space and time is supporting new collaborative formats and new sources of competitive advantage, while also creating new challenges and divides (Lumineau, Wang, & Schilke, 2021; Malhotra, Majchrzak, & Lyytinen, 2021). More broadly, digitalization affects not only the pillars of strategic management, such as firms' behaviors, firms' differences, or firms' factors of success or failure in international competition (Rumelt, Schendel, & Teece, 1994) but also raises critical questions about what we think we know about strategic management (Teece, 2020).

    Aims and Scope of the Special Issue

    This special issue aims to bring together scholars to discuss the implications of digitalization on collaborative strategies. The scholars will explore opportunities to better understand how these changes affect both cooperation and coordination issues as well as competitive challenges and opportunities. They will analyze the interplay between the social, technological, and organizational factors that underlie collaboration in the digital age.

    Topics of Interest

    We believe that this Special Issue will help strategy scholars to reevaluate and reorient strategy research on collaboration around a range of important issues such as:

    • Mode of collaboration and governance forms
    • Scope, nature, and length of the collaboration
    • Collaboration partnerships
    • Firms' strategic behaviors and factors of differentiation
    • The nature of competition in the digital age
    • Impact of XR and blockchain technologies on digital collaboration
    • Advances in the theory-based view of digital collaboration
    • Top management team processes for collaboration-oriented strategic decision making
    • Strategic problem formulation and solving to support collaboration
    • Digital collaboration for open strategy formulation
    • Fundamental capabilities for digital collaboration

    This list of issues is illustrative rather than exhaustive. We are open to other similar issues pertaining to digital collaboration.

    Conference

    We will be hosting an online ("virtual") conference with Strategic Management Review to attract new research on this topic. We seek proposals interested in developing papers and essays that advance theory by focusing on collaborative strategies in the digital age. Selected papers from the conference will be invited to submit a completed manuscript to a special issue of Strategic Management Review. Participation in the conference is not necessary for submission to the special issue. The conference is intended to provide developmental feedback to the authors.

    Submission Proposals

    Proposals are to be no longer than 1,500 words. The proposal should equate to the introduction of a paper in which the challenge is formulated, the solution summarized, the new value created described, and the proposed contents of a future paper. Selected proposals will be invited for presentation during the virtual conference. The aim will be to generate rich developmental feedback to develop full-length manuscripts.

    Submission and Conference Details

    June 15, 2023: Paper proposal submission

    June 30, 2023: Paper proposal selections announced

    September 2023: Online conference

    April 1, 2024: Paper submission deadline to Strategic Management Review

    April 2025: Target date for electronic publishing of special issue

    Please contact Fabrice Lumineau (lumineau@hku.hk) or Arvind Malhotra (Arvind_Malhotra@kenan-flagler.unc.edu) with any questions.

    The full call for papers is available here: https://www.strategicmanagementreview.net/assets/articles/Collaborative%20Strategies%20CfP.pdf



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    Fabrice Lumineau
    Professor of Strategic Management
    University of Hong Kong
    https://www.fbe.hku.hk/people/fabrice-lumineau/
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