The Lally School of Management & Technology

Digital systems within and across firm boundaries have become fundamental to business operations, spanning multiple activities in value chains and supply chains. As firms continue to digitize their business processes and enhance their capabilities via increasingly powerful computing platforms, they are better able to access and process critical knowledge in real-time, increasing their awareness of emerging market opportunities, and their ability to respond to those opportunities. Business actions are becoming increasingly inseparable from information technology (IT), either IT-enabled or IT-induced. Consequently, digital systems, and IT in general, are becoming core to many products and services, and thereby becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the business. Thus, there is a pressing need to move toward a more expansive view of the relationship between digital systems and competitive action.

In June 2008, Information Systems Research (ISR) initiated a special issue to stimulate fresh investigation of the relationship between digital systems and emergent competition. All lenses of inquiry into the nature of this relationship are encouraged, including: strategic, organizational, behavioral, economic, and technical.

This research symposium held at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is intended to gather together authors of papers for which revisions are invited to present their work and get valuable feedback for improving their research results, following the first round of ISR review.