個案總覽

To remain competitive, smart multinationals ensure they can rapidly globalize or localize certain parts of their businesses as needed. Here’s how they do it.

To remain competitive, smart multinationals ensure they can rapidly globalize or localize certain parts of their businesses as needed. Here's how they do it.

Digital transformation can be particularly complex in manufacturing because it requires the multistaged integration of physical assets with digital technologies. The authors’ research finds that manufacturers that succeed in adopting transformative tech take a three-stage approach â€" making efficiency gains, leveling up digital capabilities, and then growing via innovation â€" and that they apply the right metrics during each stage.

Many of the most successful firms - such as Alibaba, Google, and Uber - operate platforms. Electric vehicles (EVs) are platform goods as well because value comes from the vehicle plus complementary providers. Gasoline vehicles are also platform goods, but managers in the industry can ignore that because the refueling network is mature. However, temporal and structural differences in network effects for electric vehicles make it crucial for EV firms to incorporate platform strategies. This article explains these differences and outlines the key platform strategy decisions that EV firms need to make, including platform network coordination, launch, and openness.

For decades, the five-forces model of competition has dominated the thinking about strategy. But it describes competition among traditional "pipeline" businesses, which succeed by optimizing the activities in their value chains--most of which they own or control. "Platform" businesses that bring together consumers and producers, as Uber, Alibaba, and Airbnb do, require a different approach to strategy. The critical asset of a platform is external--the community of members. The focus shifts from controlling resources to orchestrating them, and firms win by facilitating more external interactions and creating "network effects" that increase the value provided to all participants. In this new world, competition can emerge from seemingly unrelated industries and even from within the platform itself. The authors, three platform strategists, walk executives through the choices they must make when building platforms, outlining the different metrics needed to manage them. Businesses that fail to learn the new rules will struggle, they argue. When a platform enters the marketplace of a pure pipeline business, the platform nearly always wins. That's exactly what happened when the iPhone came on the scene in 2007. By 2015, it accounted for 92% of global profits in mobile phones, while most of the giants that once ruled the industry made no profit at all.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The increase in outsourcing and offshoring of complex work has resulted in innovation efforts that require coordination across cultural, geographic and legal boundaries. If that coordination is mishandled, companies can find themselves needing to make multimillion- or even billion-dollar changes. The authors show how problems often arise along the boundaries between organizations and activities -with the likelihood of trouble increasing with the complexity of the work being done. Then they provide guidance on how to define boundaries. Specifically: What activities to combine/ separate; what should be in-sourced or outsourced; and what to onshore or offshore. Once boundaries have been established, the authors explain how they can be spanned by rules, technology and people. Even so, the complexity of the task makes midcourse corrections likely. Managers must anticipate and adapt their processes in order to reduce risk and, ultimately, cost.

When outsourcing the design of a platform-based product, avoid three common perils: misaligned objectives, unanticipated rivalry between design partners, and poor version control. If you don't elude these dangers, your planned cost savings-and even your entire platform-could be in jeopardy.

Two-sided networks, or platforms, often enjoy significantly greater returns at scale than traditional value chains. Despite these advantages, many companies struggle to develop these platforms in a sustainable way. This largely stems from an assumption that products with network effects will operate in the same way as traditional products, leading managers to make highly flawed decisions. In this article, the authors draw on recent theoretical work to guide executives negotiating the challenges of two-sided networks, touching on how to develop a pricing scheme, how to manage "winner take all" dynamics, and how to address the threat of envelopment by an adjacent platform. There are no easy answers, but thinking through the challenges presented in this piece will give you the tools you need to move forward with confidence.