Collaboration in agile enterprises

Agile enterprises are organizations designed to reconfigure their people, processes, and partnerships quickly in response to shifting markets, and understanding how collaboration enables that reconfiguration sits at the heart of this area of research. Scholars examine how firms form collaborative networks and virtual enterprises—temporary alliances of independent organizations that pool capabilities without merging permanently—and use structured methods like interpretive structural modeling to map the causal relationships among factors such as workforce agility, trust, and information sharing. The practical stakes are high: manufacturers that cannot coordinate across fluid organizational boundaries risk losing competitiveness precisely when speed matters most. Ongoing questions include how to measure and develop workforce agility at the individual and team level, and how governance structures in virtual enterprises can remain robust enough to sustain collaboration without sacrificing the flexibility that makes such arrangements worthwhile in the first place.

Works

62,814

Total citations

239,859

Keywords

Collaborative NetworksAgile ManufacturingVirtual EnterpriseInterpretive Structural ModelWorkforce AgilityOrganizational Agility