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Academic libraries develop strategic plans as instruments for grounding operational work in shared vision and measurable goals. The authors of this chapter test the assumption that technical services work is often absent in library strategic plans, even if that work is an assumed component. They explore the representation of technical services through a rich content analysis of Association of Research Libraries member strategic plans to reveal key themes and use the results as a tool to more broadly develop a set of guiding principles for technical services professionals in the 21st century. To provide valuable and relevant services to users, technical services professionals must develop bold and sustainable guiding principles informed by both their representation in their libraries' strategic plans and emerging trends in academic libraries.

Strategic decision-making is a complex process and encompasses an exhaustive knowledge base, collective guidance, contemporary foresight, analytical capabilities, paradigmatic congruence, and risk assessment and optimization within mission space. Employing advanced sciences convergence and analytical methodologies, the aim of this report is to provide a set of plausible solution trajectories to complex scenarios.

Three methodologies are reported here which provide policymakers with plausible solution pathways and alternatives. The methodologies, namely: TechFARM, ADAMS, and NESTTS, involve convergence of scientific disciplines, cutting edge technologies, social dynamics, astute extraction, and principles of foresight to support the process of informed decision-making, as comprehensive tools to develop a plausible solution space and future trends.

The methodologies provided in this report provide scientific basis to trends analysis and foresight. Few selected examples are reported here indicating its practical implications. The methodologies are currently applied to and likely to be used for many applications in trends analysis for government, industry, and even academics. These applications are particularly relevant to policy-making due to their capacity for identification of emerging trends.

Being highly adaptable, these methodologies were initially generated for defense applications, but have since been applied to clean water, cyber-security, the medical sector, and environmental health and safety (EHS) and evaluating eco-toxicity of nanomaterials, to strategically address a variety of global challenges. Additionally, these methodologies support investment recommendations and implementation of policies that promise significant benefit to the public at large.

The need for management to better anticipate the future is the urgent message currently being advocated by consultants in strategic market planning. Uses a survey of high‐level managers from Fortune 1,000 corporations to illustrate the advantages of cultivating a flexible mindset concerning environmental trends and their strategic marketing implications. Reviews projected developments in the economy, technology, ecology and the social/political environments that are expected to occur by 2005. Discusses appropriate marketing responses to these trends.

This paper aims to help scholars to know the frontiers in the strategic management field. On studying, it was noted that business strategic management originated from America in the 1960s and has experienced more than half a century. However, strategic management development lacks systematical summary in the twenty-first century. The scientometric method was appliedto find out the frontiers and progress of the research of strategic management in the twenty-first century, based on the literature from 2001 to 2012 in the Strategic Management Journal.

In the paper, the authors mainly used the scientometric method and applied keywords, co-occurrence method combined with multistatistical methods and mutation words analysis, author co-citation, literature co-citation and keywords co-occurrence (national).

The findings show that the strategic management research focuses on the following theories and academic thoughts: knowledge-based view, network organization research and dynamic capability are the mainstream; besides, strategy risk, the stakeholders analysis of strategy management, corporate reputation and strategic concept also attract the attention of researchers; Barney, Teece and Porter have made significant contributions to strategy management research since the twenty-first century.

The findings in the paper will help scholars in the field of strategic management to know the main frontiers of the theory, as well as the main contributors.

Takes a strategic journey into the future of the airline industry and air travel. The strategic trends and profound changes that are sweeping through the world airline industry and air travel currently, as well as into the next millennium, are analysed. So too are the responses of the lead airlines that are leading the charge in shaping as well as responding to these changes, which will present new opportunities, threats and challenges to airlines with global aspirations operating on the world stage. Singapore Airlines was analysed with British Airways and United Airlines as the leading European and US comparison airlines, respectively, for comparative and benchmarking purposes.

The purpose of the study was to detect trends in human resource management (HRM) research presented in journals during the 2000–2020 timeframe. The research question is: How are the interests of researchers changing in the field of HRM and which topics have gained popularity in recent years?

The approach adopted in this study was designed to overcome all the limitations specific to the systematic literature reviews and bibliometric studies presented in the Introduction. The full texts of papers were analyzed. The text-mining tools detected first clusters and then trends, moreover, which limited the impact of a researcher's bias. The approach applied is consistent with the general rules of systematic literature reviews.

The article makes a threefold contribution to academic knowledge. First, it uses modern methodology to gather and synthesize HRM research topics. The proposed approach was designed to allow early detection of nascent, non-obvious trends in research, which will help researchers address topics of high value for both theory and practice. Second, the results of our study highlight shifts in focus in HRM over the past 19 years. Third, the article suggests further directions of research.

In this study, the approach designed to overcome the limitations of using systematic literature review was presented. The analysis was done on the basis of the full text of the articles and the categories were discovered directly from the articles rather than predetermined. The study's findings may, however, potentially be limited by the following issues. First, the eligibility criteria included only papers indexed in the Scopus and WoS database and excluded conference proceedings, book chapters, and non-English papers. Second, only full-text articles were included in the study, which could narrow down the research area. As a consequence, important information regarding the research presented in the excluded documents is potentially lost. Third, most of the papers in our database were published in the International Journal of Human Resource Management, and therefore such trends as “challenges for international HRM” can be considered significant (long-lasting). Another – the fourth – limitation of the study is the lack of estimation of the proportion between searches in HRM journals and articles published in other journals. Future research may overcome the above-presented limitations. Although the authors used valuable techniques such as TF-IDF and HDBSCAN, the fifth limitation is that, after trends were discovered, it was necessary to evaluate and interpret them. That could have induced researchers' bias even if – as in this study – researchers from different areas of experience were involved. Finally, this study covers the 2000–2020 timeframe. Since HRM is a rapidly developing field, in a few years from now academics will probably begin to move into exciting new research areas. As a consequence, it might be worthwhile conducting similar analyses to those presented in this study and compare their results.

The present study provides an analysis of HRM journals with the aim of establishing trends in HRM research. It makes contributions to the field by providing a more comprehensive and objective review than analyses resulting from systematic literature reviews. It fills the gap in literature studies on HRM with a novel research approach – a methodology based on full-text mining and a big data toolset. As a consequence, this study can be considered as providing an adequate reflection of all the articles published in journals strictly devoted to HRM issues and which may serve as an important source of reference for both researchers and practitioners. This study can help them identify the core journals focused on HRM research as well as topics which are of particular interest and importance.

The Rockefeller Foundation has developed the first‐of‐its‐kind trend monitoring effort in the philanthropic and broader social sector, conceptualizing and operationalizing an approach that surfaces cutting‐edge intelligence with a distinctly on‐the‐ground perspective from individuals and institutions living and working throughout the developing world, known as the Searchlight function. The Searchlight function consists of a network of forward‐looking, regionally focused horizon scanning and trend monitoring organizations that conduct regular, ongoing scanning for novel ideas, research results, and “clues” as to where the world is evolving. This article aims to focus on the Searchlight function and to introduce the Special Issue.

The article describes the goals and evolution of the Searchlight function, an important set of lessons learned, and an overview of the synthesis and visualization efforts that have been applied to the Searchlight outputs.

The insights demonstrate that multiple, complementary synthesis and visualization methods can be applied to pull together the findings from a diverse range of horizon scanning activities. These cover a broad spectrum of approaches, ranging from the qualitative to the quantitative, from automated to non‐automated, from local to global, and from top‐down to bottom‐up. They show how different audiences can be reached effectively, from engaging the interested lay public to producing materials for experts in the field.

The articles outlined help to advance methodological thinking and provide benchmarks for horizon scanning, trend synthesis, and visualization that the foresight field can learn from and adopt over time.

Organizations across a range of sectors face the common challenge of how to monitor the current context in which they operate. While governments and businesses have developed novel ways of generating, processing, and acting on timely information that has long‐term relevance and significance, the development and philanthropic sectors have generally been slow to adopt these foresight practices. The Searchlight function is beginning to fill this gap in the social sector.

The Searchlight function demonstrates how the practice of anticipating and tracking trends and envisioning different alternatives for how global issues might evolve can be harnessed to shape the future of human development and to improve the lives of poor and vulnerable populations. Creating such a global endeavor on this scale requires an iterative process linking together talented and committed individuals and institutions dedicated to a common goal.

The Searchlight function demonstrates one way that the philanthropic and broader social sector can take steps to think and act with the long‐term future more explicitly in mind by anticipating the most challenging problems and opportunities that might impact the lives of poor or vulnerable populations over the long‐term future. It shows how an organization can use trend monitoring and horizon scanning to better understand how the dynamic issues facing poor and vulnerable populations intertwine to create the complex realities of today and how they might fit together to illuminate the new realities of tomorrow.

Strategic alliances can be effective ways to diffuse new technologies rapidly, to enter a new market, to bypass governmental restrictions expeditiously, and to learn quickly from the leading firms in a given field. However, strategic alliances are not simple or easy to create, develop, and support. Strategic alliances projects often fail because of tactical errors made by management. By using a well managed strategic alliances agreement, companies can gain in markets that would otherwise be uneconomical. Considerable time and energy must be put forth by all involved in order to create a successful alliance. It is essential that corporations enter into strategic alliances arrangements with a comprehensive plan outlining detailed expectations, requirements, and expected benefits.

Strategic alliances generally represent inter‐firm cooperative agreements aimed at achieving competitive advantage for the partners. In recent years, there has a dramatic increase in strategic alliances by multinational firms.This paper aims to explore the essence of these alliances and why they have become such a growing area of research in business in recent years.

Discusses strategic alliances between corporations and institutions of higher education. The major underlying motives for creating these alliances and the critical success factors are also discussed. The paper also analyzes the success stories.

Highlights the major advantages for the academic community – research funding and practical learning opportunities for students – and for industry – lower research and development costs and technology transfer opportunities that affect competitiveness. The drawbacks may include the partners’ different working cultures and values. Finds that alliances must be supported by continuous learning and restructuring processes to overcome the differences.

Extracts the valuable lessons that might help others to effectively utilize strategic alliances between corporations and institutions of higher education.

The number of strategic alliances has almost doubled in the past ten years and is expected to increase even more in the future. More than 20,000 corporate alliances have been formed world‐wide over the past two years, and the number of alliances in the USA has grown by 25 percent each year since 1987. Outsourcing is a form of strategic alliance which is attractive for many organizations, but it is not simple or easy to create, develop, and support. There are many implementation problems and the failure rate is projected to be as high as 70 percent. In this paper a case study methodology is employed and the chosen case is outsourcing. Our case study shows that the development of a long‐term strategic outsourcing relationship requires moral, ethical standards, trust and a willingness not to try to exploit the new relationship at the expense of long‐term cooperation. The paper concludes that a strategic outsourcing relationship needs a specific management strategy and that companies should also pay more attention to the burdens embedded within it.