CALL FOR PAPERS

Strategic Change

Briefings in Entrepreneurial Finance

SPECIAL ISSUE

“Resilience, Sustainability, and Identity in the Digital Age”

Dr Phil Davies, Lecturer in Operations Management, Henley Business School, Reading University.

Email: philip.davies@henley.ac.uk

Dr Zena Wood, Senior Research Fellow, Initiative for the Digital Economy, Exeter University.
Email: Z.M.Wood2@exeter.ac.uk

Professor Albrecht Fritzsche, Rabat Business School, Université Internationale de Rabat.
Email: albrecht.fritzsche@uir.ac.ma

Professor Glenn Parry, Chair of Digital Transformation, Surrey Business School, University of Surrey.

Email: g.parry@surrey.ac.uk

The special issue of Strategic Change aims to share the latest research theory and practice on topics related to future of the digital economy examining the research themes of Resilience, Sustainability, and Identity.

In the last decade, the world has become increasingly digitised, with COVID-19 accelerating this trend (OECD, 2020). According to a recent McKinsey report, it is estimated that the Internet of Things will add up to $12.4 billion to the world economy by 2030 (Chui et al, 2021). Whilst academic research initially focussed on ‘digitization’, whereby analogue processes become digital and connected, current research has shifted to a focus on ‘digitalization’, whereby digital technologies fundamentally change organisational business models, delivery systems and infrastructure to change the way products and services are created, delivered and consumed (Ng et al., 2015; Holmström et al., 2019; Kharlamov & Parry, 2020). Numerous studies focussing on digitalization has been published in various disciplines within business, such as strategic management, operations and supply chain management, international business, marketing, innovation, and broader fields such as cyber security, design and politics and international relations. Whilst broad topics have been studied, with ecosystem and platform research dominant across disciplines (e.g., Gawar, 2014; Jovanovic et al., 2021) the potential benefits for addressing the grand challenges of our time have recently come to the fore. For example, COVID-19 has exposed weaknesses in organisational and supply chain resilience (Shen & Shun, 2021; Ntasis et al., 2021), the recent COP26 has highlighted the potential role of digitalisation in supporting climate change commitments (WEF, 2021) with academic research supporting this position (Jabbour et al., 2018). At an individual level, identity underpins many key functions including content ownership, IP rights assignment, provenance and origin of content, and identity of workers. Recourse to centralised points of authority or third party identity providers runs counter to individual autonomy and so decentralised self-sovereign solutions have been developed . No doubt however, digitalisation is not a panacea, and challenges remain in its use and deployment for supporting the grand challenges of our time. Against this backdrop of this new era of grand challenges, this Special Issue (SI) of Strategic Change on Resilience (Rubbio et al., 2020; Vanpoucke and Ellis, 2020; Aldrighetti et al., 2021; Katsaliaki, Galetsi and Kumar, 2021), Sustainability (Lafargue et al., 2021) and Identity (Mühle et al., 2018; Sallal et al., 2020), in the Digital Age casts a wide net and aims to collect studies that take an interdisciplinary approach to these topics that seek to provide insights that support managers in navigating these areas and enhance business performance. Though we welcome empirical work, papers exploring conceptual ideas will be considered, providing they are presented with underpinning theoretical rigour and reflect a substantial degree of inter-disciplinarity.

Submissions should directly related to the themes of Resilience, Sustainability, and Identity. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• The future of work within the digital economy
• Value opportunities in the Digital Economy
• The links between the digital economy and the circular economy
• Resilient and sustainable operations and supply chain management
• Resilient and sustainable business models (e.g., digitally enhanced advanced services)
• The role of digitalisation in achieving net zero
• Resilient and trustworthy cyber-physical systems
• The use of new and emerging technologies (e.g., AI, blockchain & distributed ledger technologies)
• Security, privacy, and forensic technologies in the digital economy
• Personal data: analytics and management
• Identity, privacy & trust in the digital economy
• Individual’s perceptions of privacy, trust & vulnerability in the digital economy
• Ensuring an equitable digital economy
• Ensuring a sustainable digital economy
• The ethics of digital identity

Strategic Change: Briefings in Entrepreneurial Finance targets valuable findings published in scholarly research journals to create accessible ‘briefing articles’ that practitioners find appealing. Strategic Change is unique in applying vigorous research analysis to inform entrepreneurial decision-making and support start-up companies with their business direction.

The SI editors will be at the Competitive Advantage in the Digital Economy conference, held in Venice 13th-15th June, 2022. Authors are encouraged to submit their abstracts to the conference and attend (either in person or online) to present their work to get feedback direct from the editors. Promising papers can be taken forward for consideration in this special issue. NOTE: There is no requirement to submit to or attend the conference in order to submit abstracts to this journal special issue, and neither is acceptance at the conference a guarantee of acceptance to the issue.

Important Date:

The last submission date for papers to the call is 15th September 2022.

Submission Procedures:

Manuscripts should be original, unpublished, and not currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.

All submission must follow the instructions to authors that can be found on the journal homepage: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/10991697/homepage/forauthors.htmlLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window

Submissions should be emailed directly to Dr Phil Davies: philip.davies@henley.ac.uk

Enquiries should be sent directly to the Guest Editors.

References:

Aldrighetti, R., Battini, D., Ivanov, D. and Zennaro, I. (2021) ‘Costs of resilience and disruptions in supply chain network design models: A review and future research directions’, International Journal of Production Economics. Elsevier B.V., 235(March), p. 108103. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2021.108103.

COP26. (2021). Getting to net-zero: How clean electricity can be crowdsourced by digitalizing the grid, World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/clean-electrification-crowdsource-net-zero-cop26-digitalization/

Chui, M., Collins, M., & Patel, M. (2021). The Internet of Things Catching up to an accelerating opportunity, McKinsey Report. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/iot-value-set-to-accelerate-through-2030-where-and-how-to-capture-it

Gawer, A. (2014). Bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms: Toward an integrative framework. Research Policy, 43(7), 1239–1249.

Holmström, J., Holweg, M., Lawson, B., Pil, F. K. and Wagner, S. M. (2019). The digitalization of operations and supply chain management: theoretical and methodological implications. Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 65 No. 8, pp. 728-734.

Jabbour, L., Beatriz, A., Jabbour, C., Filho, M., & Roubaud, D. (2018). Industry 4.0 and the Circular Economy: A Proposed Research Agenda and Original Roadmap for Sustainable Operations. Annals of Operations Research, Vol. 270, pp.273-286.

Jovanovic, M., Sjödin, D., and Parida, V. (2021). Co-evolution of platform architecture, platform services, and platform governance: Expanding the platform value of industrial digital platforms. Technovation, (Available online).

Katsaliaki, K., Galetsi, P. and Kumar, S. (2021) Supply chain disruptions and resilience: a major review and future research agenda, Annals of Operations Research. Springer US. doi: 10.1007/s10479-020-03912-1.

Kharlamov, A. A. & Parry, G. (2021). The impact of servitization and digitization on productivity and profitability of the firm: a systematic approach”. Production Planning and Control, Vol. 32 No. 3, pp. 185-197.

Lafargue, P., Rogerson, M., Parry, G. C. and Allainguillaume, J. (2021) ‘Broken chocolate: biomarkers as a method for delivering cocoa supply chain visibility’, Supply Chain Management, (in press). doi: 10.1108/SCM-11-2020-0583.

Ntasis, L., Konstantinos, K., & Pappas, T. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 on the technology sector: The case of TATA Consultancy Services. Strategic Change, Vol. 30 (2), pp. 137-144.

Mühle, A., Grüner, A., Gayvoronskaya, T. & Meinel, C. 2018, "A survey on essential components of a self-sovereign identity", Computer science review, vol. 30, pp. 80-86.

Ng, I., K. Scharf, G. Pogrebna, and R. Maull. (2015). Contextual Variety, Internet-of-Things and the Choice of Tailoring over Platform: Mass Customisation Strategy in Supply Chain Management. International Journal of Production Economics, Vol. 159, pp. 76– 87.

OECD. (2021). OECD Economic Outlook 2020. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/digital/oecd-digital-economy-outlook-2020-bb167041-en.htm

Rogerson, M. and Parry, G. C. (2020) ‘Blockchain: case studies in food supply chain visibility’, Supply Chain Management, 25(5), pp. 601–614. doi: 10.1108/SCM-08-2019-0300.

Rubbio, I., Bruccoleri, M., Pietrosi, A. and Ragonese, B. (2020) ‘Digital health technology enhances resilient behaviour: evidence from the ward’, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, 39(2), pp. 260–293. doi: 10.1108/IJOPM-02-2018-0057.

Sallal, M., Schneider, S., Casey, M., Dupressoir, F., Treharne, H., Dragan, C., Riley, L. & Wright, P. 2020, "Augmenting an Internet Voting System with Selene Verifiability using Permissioned Distributed Ledger", IEEE, , pp. 1167.

Shen, Z., & Sun, Y. (2021). Strengthening supply chain resilience during COVID-19: A case study of JD.com, Journal of Operations Management, (Available online).

Vanpoucke, E. and Ellis, S. C. (2020) ‘Building supply-side resilience – a behavioural view’, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, 40(1), pp. 11–33. doi: 10.1108/IJOPM-09-2017-0562.

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