Context-adaptive business networks

Abstract

Businesses are facing turbulences in an environment that includes social, political, technical and economic challenges. Traditional business networks lack the adaptability to rapidly reconfigure their strategy, people, structure, business processes, and systems to respond to such challenges. In this paper we analyse structures and limitations of traditional business networks (Sect. 2). Based on the literature on adaptive business networks (ABN) which have been discussed for about two decades (Sect. 3) we outline the most important conceptualisations of ABN. In order to emphasise the integrated perspective on the strategic, social, structural, business process, and information systems level - which we consider to be essential for adaptability - we create the term "Context-Adaptive Business Networks (CABN)" (Sect. 4). We discuss the necessary features of context-adaptability in more detail (Sect. 5) and conclude with suggestions how this context-adaptability can be achieved on all five levels (Sect. 6).