Outsourcing is no longer just an operational issue. As globalization takes hold and more companies shift more activities to suppliers in emerging economies, outsourcing is now a strategic concern. Slowly, a question began to emerge in the consciousness of major manufacturers: were suppliers learning too much? In other words, was it possible that by ‘learning […]
Read More… from When Supply Chain Partners Move Up the Value Chain
Africa’s growth and development prospects over the past decade have attracted the attention of investors, development agencies and governments across the world. ‘Traditional partners’ — i.e. the Americans and the Europeans — have been joined by new ‘players’ from Asia and Latin America. China, unsurprisingly, leads the emerging-power league: trade between the country and the […]
"Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" – A person is a person through other persons. (from the humanist African philosophy Ubuntu) The ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP), the world’s poorest socio-economic group, as defined by business thinker C. K. Prahalad and his colleagues, has received much attention from marketing academics and practitioners in the past 10 years, both […]
Read More… from Collectivism and Consumers at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ in South Africa
A parent company can either centralize decision-making related to a foreign subsidiary at the parent company headquarters or decentralize those decisions to the subsidiary. Working with two decades worth of data from U.S. multinationals, Leslie Robinson and Phillip Stocken of the Tuck School of Business identified some key factors that determine which is the better […]
Read More… from Centralized or Decentralized Decision Rights in Multinationals
The field of brand management is undergoing a metamorphosis as the pace of change in our world increases. The brand-building process we used to take for granted, particularly in terms of communication, has changed irrevocably. No longer can leaders and their marketing teams rely simply on slick advertising campaigns to market their products, boost the […]
Read More… from All-consuming: Brand Management in the Digital Age
Susan Perkins, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and a visiting professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, sought to empirically measure the role of prior international experience in the success or failure of a firm’s subsequent international activities. She based her research on data from the investment activity of 96 foreign-owned […]
How do you sell an automobile in an emerging nation where salaries are a tiny fraction of salaries in developed countries? The traditional answer: make a cheaper model of the car you sell in developed countries. Companies traditionally take the products they are selling in developed markets and then make small changes to those products […]
Read More… from Reverse Innovation: Ideas from Emerging Countries
