In the past two decades, along with China's rapidly growing economy and its integration into the world economic system, the Chinese software outsourcing industry has also risen from zero to being fairly significant in the world IT market. It is currently growing much faster than the world market. Beyondsoft Co. Ltd., established in 1995, is a leading company in China's software outsourcing industry. This case poses challenges for future development, post the world financial turmoil of 2008-2009.

Juner New Materials (Juner) is a private China - based company that develops, produces, and distributes modified plastic compounds. Founded in 1995 by female serial entrepreneur Xiaomin Chen, Juner has exhibited strong performance and growth potential in the past fifteen years. The company currently has a workforce of more than 300 employees and is an icon of high-technology ventures in Zhejiang province. As Juner strives to become the leader in China's modified plastics industry, the company presently faces scalability challenges primarily limited by financing constraints. Recently, with two major competitors having raised additional capital through their respective public offerings, Juner has reacted to these market changes. Since competition was aggressively dedicating new resources toward production and service capacity expansion, by June 2010 it was apparent that external funding was imperative for extending and sustaining Juner's competitive edge. Upon several discussions, Chen and the board of Juner concluded that it was opportune to take Juner public. The decision to go public has led to the discussion of several issues: (1) the choice of stock exchange, (2) the "justified" valuation based upon Juner's fundamentals and respective comparables, and (3) the methods Juner would adopt to maintain its growth rate and exceed investor expectations before and after the IPO.

This case focuses on the competitive strategy of the number two management software company in China, Kingdee, as it competes with UFIDA and major international firms SAP and Oracle for position in the Chinese market. A particular focus is on its internal culture as it tries to grow rapidly with a very young non-Hokou-bearing staff in Shenzhen.

The five-case UFIDA series is about China's largest supplier of management/ERP software, its 20-year evolution, and current strategic challenges. The (A) case is the cornerstone of the series. It introduces the company's history, strategic turning points, current market position and competition. It is a standalone case that may be used in a strategy course. It may also be used to highlight the interaction between strategic competitors within an industry. In this situation, subsequent classes would be devoted to the Kingdee and Beyondsoft cases. It may be paired with the UFIDA (B) case to add a focus on people and their values. It may be used in an accounting and control course, paired with the UFIDA (C) case, to illustrate the evolution of planning and budgeting systems. It may be used in a finance course, accompanied by the UFIDA (D) case, which highlights the critical role of capital markets and finance in a growing company. Finally, it can be used in an international course with the UFIDA (E) case to focus on the special international expansion issues of a Chinese firm.

This case highlights the leadership, cultural and organizational structure dimensions of UFIDA. The case begins with Founder/Chairman Wang Wenjing's rags-to-riches story. Then UFIDA's senior and middle management of different backgrounds talk about their leader, Chairman Wang Wenjing. They voice their opinions on Wang Wenjing's leadership style, UFIDA's corporate culture and vision. This case complements the UFIDA (A) case which looks at the organization as a whole, while the (B) case focuses on the people and their values. From different angles, students can feel Chairman Wang Wenjing's management style and his personal impact on UFIDA. The company, over 20 years, has been a successful management software provider in China (its biggest domestic provider.) At the core, the key question is, "Can Chairman Wang Wenjing's leadership style, UFIDA's culture 2.0 and organizational structure, together sustain UFIDA's future growth and goal accomplishment?"

This case documents the evolution of UFIDA's management control system over a decade as it grew five-fold from a 325 million RMB to a 1.66 billion RMB company, while its staff grew by more than three-fold.

This case describes the financing decisions of a software company at difference stages of its development. Started from 1988 as an individual business, along with the "Reform and Open" policy of China, the firm has experienced tremendous growth, and has become a leading publicly listed software company with a more than 2.3 billion RMB revenue from principal business product sales as of 2009. The students are required to assess the capital requirement necessary to support the firm growth and the feasible financing tools available at each stage, and evaluate the firm financing decision. The students need to give an estimate of the stock price at the time of the case is taught. Identifying a long term strategic investment plan becomes a key consideration in structuring the firm's next-round financing to achieve the goal of 10 billion RMB business revenue set by the CEO of the firm.

In 2004, China's largest management software provider UFIDA began internationalization. In the subsequent 6 years, UFIDA entered Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam and other overseas Asian markets. Nonetheless, UFIDA's overseas business footprint was still very limited, with overseas revenue only accounting for 0.43% of UFIDA's total sales in 2009. In the later part of 2009, UFIDA outlined their new Three-Year Plan for 2010-2012. In this Plan, internationalization was a focal point of the UFIDA strategy. In the coming 3 years, UFIDA would drastically increase the proportion of revenues from overseas sales, reaching 10% within 5 years, and 25% within 10 years. This case study highlights UFIDA's launch of their 2010 - 2012 internationalization strategy.

Innovation is a While the introduction of an innovative product or service may be highly publicized or glamorous, the process of innovation is driven less by creative brainstorming or strategic planning than by carefully managed and highly sophisticated cross-disciplinary thinking and research. This article explains how to manage the “fuzzy front end” of innovation, which refers to the insight-driven, prototype-powered search for innovation in the 21st century. It details seven phases of this strategic innovation process, including collecting customer insights, sense making and opportunity mapping, rapid concept prototyping, and customer cocreation.

This article suggests that the time is approaching when organizations will need chief creative officers instead of chief executive officers, and chief collaboration officers instead of chief operating officers. Managers are given practical steps on how to become a chief creative officer, and how to transform an organization into one capable of unleashing the power of self-organizing swarms. It also outlines the four types of knowledge workers — artists, scientists, teachers, and managers — and discusses the Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) seminar.

Due to their conservative nature, excessive aversion to risk, and strong reluctance to venture outside their comfort zone, Canadian businesses are being held back from seizing enormous opportunities in Asia. The article questions whether Canadians care about this failing and argues that Canadian business leaders must set their sights higher. It also offers steps on how to close the knowledge gaps that stop Canadian businesses from succeeding in Asia, including diversification of boards and corporate management teams, and awareness of expatriate management problems.

Imitators are often so successful that they push innovators out of business. Innovation has a well-established argument based on higher sales and growth, lower costs, and the transformation of a firm’s capabilities, yet imitators enjoy many of the same benefits. In fact, an imitator’s overall costs are estimated at 60 to 75 per cent lower. Generic drug makers, for example, not only leverage the investments of original developers but also save billions of dollars and decades of effort. With the benefit of hindsight, imitators capitalize on the shortcomings of early offerings. They choose what to adopt, singling out profitable opportunities, and are less likely to be complacent than innovators. However, even in an age of imitation ushered in by factors like globalization and outsourcing, business scholars have failed to recognize imitation as a complex endeavour that requires rare and valuable capabilities. <br><br>Crucially, imitation and innovation are not opposites. Though the capabilities to imitate share much with the capacity to innovate, innovators do not adopt them because of the stigma of imitation. This has prevented many firms from becoming “imovators,” able to fuse innovation and imitation. Good innovators and imitators both adapt imported elements or systems, combine different knowledge bases, and identify and leverage “spillovers.” Innovators are better at producing effective barriers to imitation, as much as imitators are experts at finding ways to overcome those barriers. In combining these two skill sets, firms can reap the benefits of innovation.

This article presents the Dynamic Capabilities Framework, which gives a prominent intellectual infrastructure for both theoretical and applied analyses of strategic management and other issues facing business makers. The popular management theory outlined here discusses the growing importance of intangible assets, the differences between intangible and physical assets, and the three clusters of activities and adjustments that define dynamic capabilities — sensing, seizing, and transforming — as illustrated with the example of various Apple products.

Bring up the topic of innovation and often the conversation will soon revolve around a cool, new gadget or an exciting start-up company with a revolutionary idea.-- If the talk is about the challenge of innovation, it usually focuses on developing something new, original and radically different. -- As the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity points out in its recent report, innovation has now become synonymous with invention, when invention is just part of the process of innovation.

A business leader cannot create a values-driven culture with rules and mission statements alone. Using techniques such as pre-scripting, rehearsal and peer coaching, leaders can learn to listen and employees can learn to speak, thus creating a circle of practice that removes values from the realm of aspiration and positions them squarely within the realm of everyday business practice. Readers will learn how to accomplish this important goal in this article.

For the companies that accept how time operates on their target markets and customers, time scarcity and attention scarcity will provide one of the best paths for innovation in the future. This article, by a former HP executive, examines how time spent shopping has remained constant over the past decades, even while the number of products has increased. It also discusses the Time-Value Framework and five modes of Time-Value Innovation, including Time Magnets and Time Slicing.

Many companies have embraced open innovation and not met success. But some of these companies are unfit for open innovation because they lack the capabilities needed to promote and leverage internal and external collaboration. These authors describe three innovation strategies — need seeker, technology driver, and market reader — and four steps for establishing open innovation. The article concludes with an interview with the chief technology officer of 3M, one of the world’s most innovative companies.

In October 2010, Triangulate's founder/CEO must determine what product features to develop and what marketing programs to pursue in order to boost the odds of successfully raising another venture capital round for his nine month-old Facebook dating application. The case recounts the process of launching a consumer internet startup, from idea conception through initial efforts to validate the concept, followed by product launch and subsequent business model "pivots."

The executive director of British Columbia’s Neonatal Services Program was thinking about her last meeting with the officials at the British Columbia Ministry of Health Services (MHS). Following a report indicating that from 2007 to 2008 the province sent 98 expectant mothers and newborns to the United States for treatment, the province was considering adding more neonatal intensive care capacity. Political pressure was mounting after one of Canada’s national newspapers covered the problem in a front-page story. The MHS asked the executive director to suggest bed allocations and other improvements to address the situation.

A market research company has collected a large dataset on brand equity for the fast food and travel sectors. It has come up with a way of measuring brand equity. Various statistical techniques are used to assess the concept of brand equity. These include descriptive statistics, crosstabs, ANOVA, and MANOVA.