The characteristics which will contribute to the long term success and sustainability will be ..

1. Adaptiveness, sensitivity and understanding to the the social and cultural needs

2. Capable to provide Simplified solutions

3. Continuously investing in its' own people

4. Honest and morally upright management

Thanks. These are great points. But are simplified solutions enough? What's with innovation? Coming up with new sophisticated solutions to create new markets? Any thoughts about "mass-customization"?

The survival of the next generation enterprise is based on its ability to deal with an ever increasing complexification of its environment, its ability to innovate, and its structural flexibility. These three competencies - if I may call them so - are interactive and cannot be taken in isolation since they affect each other. In other words, I think it is an increasingly complex task.

But I strongly believe that one of the things an enterprise can do as a first step is build flexibility in its organisational structure. There is a wide recognition that organisational structure can inhibit innovation or the innovation potential of an organisation. In addition, innovation capabilities are hard to develop and sustain, so the modern enterprises may have to engage in collaborations to achieve that. Therefore, it may become inevitable for an enterprise to have geographically distributed organisational units that use ICT to collaborate, innovate, and achieve collective action trough a network structure that operates way beyond the traditional hierarchy.

Another important point to consider is to ensure that resources are developed and combined in a unique way that makes it very difficult for competing enterprises to replicate (further details can be found in the strategy literature, notably the Resource Based View). Here, the idea is that the survivability of an enterprise depends on its ability to outplay its competitors.

One last note: the modern enterprise should not downplay the importance of knowledge and its management, acquisition, transfer, and the ability to transform tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge...Building a knowledge capital, retaining it, developing it further and over time can ensure that an enterprise survives comfortably in its environment.

Thanks for the insights. Really helpful. What role does IT play?

In a recent article with Liisa Valikangas, we looked at the "next generation enterprise" challenge from the perspective of organizational resilience. We applied the 'resilience' lense to a case study of a large U.S.-based retailer to explore how an enterprise can develop the ability to recover quickly from environmental jolts or misfortunes. Our analysis of this case suggests that generative doubt, organizational slack, and mindful engagement throughout the organization are key conditions for resilience -- and possibly therefore also for the design, organization & governance of next generation corporations.

Article How to design for strategic resilience: A case study in retailing