MIT Sloan Management Review

Today, the task of the global strategist involves not only identifying where to leverage a company’s strength but also how to enhance and renew its capabilities. The experience of many global companies suggests that expensive mistakes are often made when companies don’t ask key questions before making internationalization decisions. By better understanding their own competitive advantages and how they might fit into or complement a new market, companies can improve their chances of success.

Companies located in developing countries are currently serving billions of local consumers with innovative and inexpensive products. But what happens when more of those companies make the leap into more developed markets? Is it inevitable that these companies will overtake the more developed companies? Using historical examples, this article looks at how disruptors and incumbents compete. For incumbents, knowing that much of their fate rests in their hands is half the battle won.

A surprising number of high-profile Western companies have stumbled in e-commerce in China, including Amazon and Google. This article offers a list of workable strategies to succeed in Chinese e-commerce, gleaned from U.S. companies’ experiences.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, in a market like China’s, where local knowledge and culture are crucial to success, more thought should be given to how to better serve local customers and adapt in a rapidly changing market.

As China’s growth and integration into the world economy continue, many companies are looking for ways to build effective business relationships with Chinese companies. China’s ways of doing business are becoming more Westernized, but non-Chinese executives must still work hard to build trust in relationships with their Chinese business partners. But developing trust between Chinese and Western executives takes time. This article explores methods for developing cross-cultural trust.

Significant growth opportunities lie in second- and third-tier cities and rural areas. But although consumers there are some disposable income, they have limited resources. That’s forcing multinationals to rethink how they design products and services to reach them.

Faced with the need to educate themselves quickly about a foreign market, companies employ a variety of approaches to learning. New research offers insights into choosing the best approach for your circumstances.

University of Cambridge’s Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu write that since 2009, the cell phone company Nokia has worked to use cell phone technology both to empower and to target the world’s rural poor.

The article offers four recommendations for an effective “network orchestration” strategy, bringing together local and global innovation partners in emerging markets. Multinationals should extend innovation partnerships beyond the usual channel partners by engaging key community stakeholders such as government bodies, universities and NGOs; engage innovation partners strategically with a larger purpose; trust but verify in a transparent manner; and designate local partner network managers.

A desire to be close to its major global customers led Halliburton Co., an international oil services group, to relocate the company’s CEO from its headquarters in Houston, Texas, to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
Image courtesy of Flickr user utpal.

Successful multinationals get that way by finding better ways to leverage operational improvements across the entire company. But developing such superior processes is not easy. New operational ideas fail for many reasons. One of the most common is not that the idea was bad, but that the developers set up a pilot that failed to persuade managers in the units that the process was an improvement. Successful pilots share three qualities: credibility, replicability and feasibility.

While technological innovations have revolutionized the workplace, it is ironic that relational boundaries — obstacles to productive human interactions — remain largely unchanged. This article identifies five types of such boundaries, and suggests that all five of them may be overcome when collaborative and creative leaders engage in six boundary spanning practices: buffering, reflecting, connecting, mobilizing, weaving and transforming.

Too little — or too much — attention from head office executives can cause problems in a company’s global operations.

Companies often approach the process of developing a global culture as a one-way process dominated by corporate headquarters, exemplified by common terms such as “cultural transfer” “and “culture dissemination.” Also, core values often originate at corporate headquarters and fail to reflect and incorporate diverse cultural influences. This approach breeds skepticism about global culture among overseas employees, who may perceive headquarters’ core values as ethnocentric and parochial.

One of the most interesting (and, alas, least-known) parts of the MIT is the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, housed just upstairs from our offices. Its mission is precise and eminently useful: "reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence."

One of the more popular magazine articles on our website is a 2006 piece by Steven D. Eppinger and Anil R. Chitkara about global product development.

Best practice in product development (PD) is migrating from local collaboration to global collaboration. Global product development (GPD) represents a transformation for business, and it applies to a range of industries. The objective of this article is to present frameworks that can help companies address strategic and tactical issues when considering GPD. The concepts have been developed through discussions with more than 100 companies in 15 countries in North America, Europe and Asia.

Too often, discussions of contemporary economic issues end up either overly simplified for popular consumption -- or too jargony and technical to be followed by anyone but economists. A new book, Offshoring of American Jobs: What Response from U.S.

This week’s official launch of Tata’s Nano — the world’s most inexpensive car — could be a sign of the times.

Looking for new strategies for doing business in the recession? Consider strategies employed by companies from emerging markets — where economic volatility and constraints on consumer disposable income are commonplace.

Two innovation experts see great potential in “creation networks” that include companies from a variety of regions with specialized technical expertise.