Industries without Borders?

The project “Industries without Borders?” was launched as part of the German-Franco Academy for the Industry of the Future as a cooperation between the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Institute Mines-Télécom (IMT) in November 2017. It aims to explore the transformation of contemporary industries and involves sociologists, economists, management and strategy researchers. In contemporary discourse, we can find the imagination that organizational borders are increasingly challenged or dissolved by digitalization. For instance, there is the idea that new digital technologies show the potential to remove barriers between a range of heterogeneous elements, such as production technologies, organizations, innovative activities and products, to name just a few. In this regard, the concept of “the industry of the future” anticipates the hopes and fears related to a more boundaryless industrial production. The project “industries without borders” pays attention to how organizational borders are dissolved or disappearing, but also how they are reinforced or created. While openness is one of the buzzwords of the last decade (keywork: open innovation), this does not mean that boundaries lose their significance in the organization of industries. In a comparative effort, the project is devoted to the development of theoretically informed empirical insights on dynamics of re-organization in contemporary industries.

Project leader(s):
Dr. Uli Meyer, Dr. Judith Igelsböck, Elena Zelesniack

Period:

Project type:
Array