Change. Enterprises face constant change in today’s global business environment. Institutional pressures, regulatory requirements, technological advancements, innovations, and economic conditions require enterprises to reassess and often change their mode of operation, business processes, product and service offerings, and interfirm relationships. Change is thus a core element in the study of enterprise transformations. We study drivers and enablers of change from strategic, technological, process, human, and organizational culture perspectives. Specific research questions include how enterprises adapt to change, what conditions facilitate or inhibit change, and how to successfully implement and manage change initiatives.

Architecture. Enterprise architecture is the structure of organizations and relationships between them within the overall enterprise. Often, architectures are not designed; rather they emerge over time. A fundamental question is how to conceptualize, design and improve architectures to support enterprise objectives, exhibiting robustness as these objectives change over time.

Networks. Virtually all of today’s products and services are created and delivered through complex and large-scale inter- and intrafirm networks. This is particularly the case for healthcare and global manufacturing. We study how the structure and dynamics of complex networks enable and drive strategy, collaboration, operations, innovation, knowledge, and value creation. Specific research questions include how to effectively manage, lead, and design complex networks, how networks evolve over time, or what implications globalization, culture, incentive structures, and policies have on the performance of networks.

Complexity. The enterprise of healthcare delivery in the U.S. and the global manufacturing networks of NCM are, without doubt, complex systems with many stakeholders, often with conflicting interests and degrees of independence seldom seen with traditional systems. Research in this area focuses on formal definitions and models of complexity, assessments of the complexity of markets and enterprises within the framework of these definitions and models, and development and evaluation of methods for designing and managing complexity.

Collaboration. Increasingly, collaboration involves complex interactions among participants who are separated by geography, time, organizations, and corporate identity. We study ways to enable collaboration in this new setting, using a broad spectrum of approaches, including interaction protocols for both physical and virtual meetings, technologies to support simultaneous and asynchronous meetings, technologies for identifying, capturing, and making explicit important common knowledge, technologies for rapidly formulating alternatives and carrying out what-if analyses, and technologies for creating and capturing new enterprise knowledge.