Ongoing Advancements in ICT and the Need for Holistic Strategic Management

Technological convergence in different professional areas with advanced ICT has become a crucial research issue in the field of technology and innovation management (TIM) and has also become a major factor causing radical innovation that leads to the creation of brand-new markets. Technological convergence has been described as the combination of technical knowledge across clearly definable areas of specialization, in particular in the context of ICT. The utilization of ICT across various industries and the integration of dissimilar technologies accelerate convergence and increase the potential to develop new products and services through co-specialization and new business models that span different industries. Responding to these environmental changes, corporations are under increasing pressure to execute dynamic reconfiguration (redefinition of their vertical and horizontal boundaries) to optimize their corporate boundaries by accelerating coordination and collaboration between disparate companies and businesses through collaborative innovation (CI).To dynamically optimize corporate boundaries with convergence such as that described above, a holistic approach for strategic management is crucial. This is a key concept in this book. Focusing on holistic systems theory, this chapter argues that building a framework for holistic strategic management requires elements of management similar to those in strategic management (strategy, organizations, technologies, operations, leadership) and analysis of synergistic interactions among these as well as an interactive and back-and-forth analysis and study at the macro and micro levels of strategic and organizational contexts of corporations, including their advanced ICT environments in particular.