Today's successful company should be able to compete by both increasing the alignment or fit among strategy, structure, culture, and processes, while simultaneously preparing for the inevitable revolutions required by discontinuous environmental change. This requires organizational and management skills to compete in a mature market where cost, efficiency, and incremental innovation are key, and to develop new products and services where radical innovation, speed, and flexibility are critical. Focusing on only one guarantees short-term success but long-term failure.
The purpose of this thesis is to suggest some solutions to the following questions with which Samsung SDI is struggling in simultaneously competing in the mature market segment of color picture tubes through incremental innovation and in emerging markets and technologies of various flat panel displays and core components for mobile communication devices through discontinuous innovation :
1. What could be an optimal vision and business strategy for Samsung SDI to remain a World leader in the 21st Century in the threat of flat panel displays as potential substitutes to color picture tubes?
2. What could be an optimal enterprise level organization structure for strategically effective configuration and integration of the existing organizations for color picture tube business, which are currently dispersed over eight locations over the world?
3. What could be an optimal enterprise level organizational structure for the new businesses of flat panel displays and core components for mobile communication devices, which require radically innovative activities for research and development, commercialization and distribution?
To examine the research questions, this thesis analyses the globalization process of the firm's color picture tube business, the firm's current competitive position in display markets, the firm's new vision and business strategy required for sustained growth, and the respective organization structures for the existing and new businesses. The major finding are summarized as follows :
1. Diversification of business into adjacent industries such as batteries, internet components and handsets as well as extension into up and down stream activities on the value chain such as PDP sets, other FPD-mounted devices and color filters is a necessary move for Samsung SDI to sustain growth in the 21st Century, while continuously milking from the cash-cow business of color picture tubes.
2. A transnational organization characterized as differentiated networks based on differentiated competencies of the individual subsidiaries of the firm is best suited to color picture tube business for maximum efficiency, quality, scale of economies and active exchange of knowledge among the networked entities.
3. A team-based process organization which is connected to the internal and external networks and has learning capability for continuous improvement is best suited to the new business of the firm for speedy innovation of the new technology and product, successful commercialization and distribution.
4. A common overarching vision and culture is necessary to strongly holds these two groups of organizations under one company. A reliance on a strong, widely shared corporate vision and culture is required to promote integration across the company and to encourage identification and sharing of information and resources. Yet, at the same time, individual business units should entertain widely varying subcultures appropriate to their particular businesses.
But this thesis also has shortcomings including but not limiting to the difficulty of generalization to the companies of other industry and lack of research on sub-unit level organization structures, which invites further researches.
