Achieving Strategic Flexibility Trough Manufacturing Innovation

Rapid technological changes, market fragmentations, the convergence of different industries, shorter product life-cycles, innovations , and so on, have made the environment more ‘hypercompetitive’ (D’aveni, 1994), truncate (Anderson and Tushman, 1990) and characterized by ‘high velocity’ (Bougeois and Eisenhardt, 1988) and chaos (DeMarie et al., 1994). As Chandler observed (1962, 1977) the impact of changing in technologies suggests new possibilities for strategies and for new organizational structures to carry out those strategies. In addition the operations have to act and react to the high level of complexity and uncertainty organizations developing new strategic approaches significantly different from the rudimental low cost, differentiation and focus archetypes (Lei and Goldhar, 1996). This paper aim to explore the impact of 3D printing technology on the strategic flexibility Proposition about strategic flexibility and a practice case are presented.