Building Global Competitiveness

By M. Isi Eromosele

To build sustainable global advantage, companies need to be involved in global collaboration. Global collaboration drive new revenue, quicken time to market and enhances innovation.

Global collaboration influences a company’s strategic implementations as well as financial growth. The effective adoption of this approach requires revaluation of traditional strategies and processes.

The competencies necessary for achieving market growth through collaboration with global partners are different from those required to be successful in cost reduction.

However, many companies continue to use the same strategies and processes to manage global collaboration projects as well as cost reduction ones. As such, they fail to obtain maximum benefit values from their implementations.

In order to implement an effective global collaboration program, a strategic company wide realignment needs to be created and implemented. Components of this realignment would include delineating the company’s global collaborative goals, adapting new business processes and establishing strategic partner relationships with other companies.

Additionally, project management techniques, communication processes and growth methodologies would need to be enhanced, considering the more complex interdependent nature of global collaborative business relationships.

A solid knowledge base would need to be built internally that encourages continuous learning, helping the company to build global collaborative competency in the shortest possible time.

In implementing a global collaborative program, a company would need to initiate a set of best practices that would ensure success. These are:

• Strategy Development
• Organizational Design
• Product Development Processes
• Project Management Techniques
• Platform Specifications
• Intellectual Property Management

Utilizing the above best practices will ensure that a company realizes the best value returns from their global collaboration relationships.

The drivers and enablers of the move to global collaboration strategy include:

• Increased complexity in the scope of technologies inherent within single products
• Low cost, yet highly educated labor force in emerging and developing countries
• Increased use of global technology principles and open architectures
• Development of powerful new collaboration tools and infrastructure

A lot of companies engage in some form of global collaboration simply to lower costs without a well articulated strategy. The result is a disjointed cost reduction strategy driven at a divisional level instead of company wide. Companies need to move towards an open, company-wide strategy that best leverages their collaborative competencies.

The global collaboration strategy will need to be aligned with the company’s business strategy. The participation of collaborative partners is essential during the strategy process. Specific areas of opportunities include acquiring capabilities and/or intellectual property not available in-house, being able to adjust and adapt resources as necessary and obtaining related knowledge for product, customer and market access.

A global collaborative strategy need to be linked to a company’s overall product development as well as research & development strategy. The business value available from global resources increases a company’s capabilities in handling the entire support of its product lines and the designing the key parts of new product architecture.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2011 Oseme Group