TMIA ASSIGNMENT

TMIA Assignment

TMIA Assignment

Introduction

This paper describes an innovation, failure, benefit in airline industry, putting focus on Boeing. This paper shows how a unique type of virtual team, deploying a computer-mediated collaborative technology, developed a radically new product. The uniqueness of the team, what we call VC3 teams, for Virtual Cross-value-chain, Creative Collaborative Teams, stemmed from the fact that it was inter-organizational and virtual, and had to compete for the attention of team members who also belong to collocated teams within their own organizations. Existing research on virtual teams does not fully address the challenges of such VC3 teams. Using the case of Boeing Rocketdyne, we describe the behavior of members of a VC3 team to derive implications for research on virtual teaming, especially for studying teams within emerging contexts such as the one we observed. (Zack 2003 207-223)

Airline Industry

Air travel remains a large and growing industry. It facilitates economic growth, world trade, international investment and tourism and is therefore central to the globalization taking place in many other industries.

In the past decade, air travel has grown by 7% per year. Travel for both business and leisure purposes grew strongly worldwide. Scheduled airlines carried 1.5 billion passengers last year. In the leisure market, the availability of large aircraft such as the Boeing 747 made it convenient and affordable for people to travel further to new and exotic destinations. Governments in developing countries realized the benefits of tourism to their national economies and spurred the development of resorts and infrastructure to lure tourists from the prosperous countries in Western Europe and North America. As the economies of developing countries grow, their own citizens are already becoming the new international tourists of the future.

Business travel has also grown as companies become increasingly international in terms of their investments, their supply and production chains and their customers. The rapid growth of world trade in goods and services and international direct investment have also contributed to growth in business travel. (Wiesenfeld 2009 777-790)

Worldwide, IATA, International Air Transport Association, forecasts international air travel to grow by an average 6.6% a year to the end of the decade and over 5% a year from 2000 to 2010. These rates are similar to those of the past ten years. In Europe and North America, where the air travel market is already highly developed, slower growth of 4%-6% is expected. The most dynamic growth is centered on the Asia/Pacific region, where fast-growing trade and investment are coupled with rising domestic prosperity. Air travel for the region has been rising by up to 9% a year and is forecast to continue to grow rapidly, although the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and 1998 will put the brakes on growth for a year or two. In terms of total passenger trips, however, the main air travel markets of the future will continue to be in and between Europe, North America and Asia. (Sage 2002 15-59)

Airlines' profitability is closely tied to economic growth and trade. During the first half of the 1990s, the ...