The development of industrial networks

Abstract

Companies organize in a way that involves more and more activities that are external to the traditional organizational boundaries and as a consequence managing operations contains more and more issues and actions dealing with external networks. Hence new challenges face managing operations. The perspective raised here may be called a shift from an enterprise to an extraprise. This article analyzes this changing operations context with the aim of identifying important issues in operations management in academia as well as in practice and concludes by proposals and hypotheses for future research.