[Study] The Platform Organization: Recombining Strategies, Structures, and Surprises

In a rapid changing environment where frantic pace of technology change happens, fixed organizational arrangements or framework can effectively optimize resource utilization. Sharpless organization (Generating new form by recombination) does settle the situation.

Characteristics of Chameleonic organization:
1.  Flexibility
2. Movement
3. Transformation
By 1. Interecting; 2. Penetrating; 3. Collating different organizational arrangements

It looks fragmented and intertwined; still it may be the only form capable of surviving in a high-tech
industry where a monolithic, rigid business identity would not seem as able to cope with the frantic pace of technological change.

The organizational structures which support the technology strategy must be able to cope simultaneously with the management of discontinuities and incremental innovation.
This has put, over time, a premium on the firm's ability to develop multiple, often inconsistent competencies, to deal with the emerging, divergent technological and organizational requirements (Burgelman 1983). As a result, existing structures, procedures, and schemes which influence action
are usually under severe strain, and managers end up feeling they are operating in a very fuzzy organizational environment.

The goal of Chameleonic organization:
In different natures, it meets frequent, sudden and radical changes, not just in products, markets and technologies, but in the very business identity and industries to which it temporarily belongs.

Trend in product life cycle:
The distinctive aspect,  the product—life cycle is extremely short and is becoming increasingly shorter. Thus, these companies must migrate from one industry to another, and even create new ones, at a pace which would be very fast even for simply implementing product changes within a stable technological horizon.

R&D guideline:The problem of defining the mission and direction of R&D, and in general terms, the global technology strategy, does not consist in choosing an alternative among various product lines or markets, but more radically, in repeatedly asking the question,  "what business are we in," i.e., what is the identity of the product, the market, the production process, and the boundaries between what should be done internally and what has to be procured externally, knowing that many of the core innovations are in the hand of external suppliers


Management guideline:
Though managers picture themselves as busy in decision making (forecasting, planning and selecting alternative courses of action) according to the strategy models in good currency, they would be better described as engaged in "sensemaking" (Weick 1979), i.e., in relentlessly picking up the pieces and left-overs of the "broken cosmologies" (past plans, marketing choices, goals, and outlooks) and trying to paste them together in order to make a new sense of t he emerging technologies, markets and industries they are enacting

Bibliography:

Ciborra, C. U. (1996). The platform organization: Recombining strategies, structures, and surprises.Organization science, 7(2), 103-118.