Chapter 8: Temporary Incorporation as a Mechanism of Strategic Responsiveness: The BBC’s Digital Transformation, 1992–2015

Established organizations regularly fail in their strategic responses to large-scale environmental transformations. In this chapter, the authors analyze the case of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) successful response to digitization of the broadcasting industry. The authors identify two main forms of strategic response – establishing external collaborations and developing internal competencies – which were driven by recurrent cycles of renewal of the BBC’s Royal Charter. The authors conceptualize this process as “temporary incorporation,” an effective driver of strategic responsiveness not yet been discussed in the literature. This discussion relates temporary incorporation to the previous work on strategic change.