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Triple Convergence is a concept developed by Thomas Friedman, in his book "The World is Flat", that explains how the flattening of the world has happened and how it has affected the macro and micro environments. Friedman describes how the world has evolved to become flat as a result of the Ten flatteners, namely, “Collapse of the Berlin Wall”, “Netscape”, “Workflow software’, “Uploading’, “Offshoring”, “Outsourcing”, “Supply chaining”, “Insourcing’, “Informing’,  “The steroids”. According to the author, these ten flatteners started to converge and work together and thus created a “flat” global political, economic, and cultural playing field. These forces that have contributed to the shaping of the emerging global trading networks are the fundamentals of the triple convergence. The triple convergence has occurred due to significant economic shifts and technological progress that happened during the last twenty years. There are three distinct junctions that make up the triple convergence.

Convergence 1
The First Convergence refers to the emergence and connection of the Ten flatteners. These flatteners depend on well-established technologies but becoming aware and exploiting the complementarities among these technologies needed time and the tipping point was around 2000.Millions of people on different continents are affected by this change. The flat world platform is now accessible by an increasing number of individuals, who are in turn closer to each other by means of communication, collaboration and competition. A good illustration of the First Convergence is Southwest Airlines that after realizing it had enough computer storage, bandwidth, internet-comfortable customers and software to create a new work flow system, developed a way for customers to print out their own boarding passes at home. This was a new form of collaboration between Southwest and its customers.

Convergence 2
The Second Convergence occurred when businesses adapted to the new technologies and learned how to use the benefits of the new platform of technologies to spur their productivity. The vertical/top down method of collaboration, where innovation comes from the top was replaced with the horizontal collaboration. Horizontalization refers to the collaboration of departments and companies with each other to create value and innovation. The value creation processes in the new flat world triggered a horizontal cooperation between managers, CEOs, business schools, designers, specialists and workers, who have changed and are still changing their habits to take advantage of the technological platform. With this process, new business practices and skills are being developed. An example of this is Wal-Mart, which enhanced the productivity by integrating big-box stores, where people could purchase soap supplies for six months with new horizontal supply-chain management systems that allowed the business to connect what a consumer took off the shelf from a Wal-Mart in Kansas City with what a Wal-Mart supplier in coastal China could produce.

Convergence 3
The Third Convergence refers to the liberation of the economies of countries such as India, China, Russia and the nations of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Latin America, that before the breaking down of the Berlin Wall had a closed economy. The “flat world” gave these countries novel economic possibilities and enabled them to be part of the horizontal collaboration, by contributing and at the same time gaining from it. Friedman researched that in the last 15 years, 3 billion people who have joined market economies are contributing to the whole globalization process. The “great sorting out” occurred in the Third Convergence. “Sorting out” refers to the changes that happened in organizational and political boundaries and hierarchies when the bureaucratic modes were replaced with collaborative modes of value creation. The triple convergence is an ongoing process that is shaping the politics and economics of the “flat world”.