In early 2020, the founder and operator of Ramon Film Productions—known familiarly as Wakaliwood—needed to manage the tensions of operating as an informal movie production company in a slum in Uganda's capital of Kampala. Although Ramon Film Productions had received much international acclaim for its ultra-low-budget action movies, the company was under increasing pressure from the local authorities to formalize, by obtaining new operating licences and complying with stricter regulations. The founder needed to weigh the costs and benefits of continuing to operate informally, compared with formalizing his business.

In January 2019, the telecommunications industry was under severe threat of disruption. Telecommunications companies (telcos), which had historically been able to cope with technological disruption by moving from first-generation through to fifth-generation cellular network technologies, were now threatened by digital service providers (DSPs)—firms that came with a new business model that threatened the telcos’ existing business models. Telcos were being forced to deliver only network connectivity, whereas DSPs had positioned themselves to deliver the more lucrative digital services directly to customers. The Norwegian telco Telenor Group (Telenor) decided to take up this battle by offering digital services to end-customers. However, doing so raised several important questions: Was full confrontation with large DSPs inevitable, or was there another way? How could Telenor switch from the old to the new business model? Was it possible to manage two conflicting business models under the same company?

In just a decade, the Danish health care product manufacturer Coloplast underwent a major transformation from a local Danish manufacturing company to a truly multinational corporation. In 2001, Coloplast conducted all its production in-house in three production facilities in Denmark. Ten years later, the company had relocated almost 90 per cent of the production to four different countries, with the majority in Hungary and China. However, a transformation of this caliber rarely comes without challenges. Coloplast’s relocation of production had largely been carried out through a trial-and-error process without an overarching corporate strategy. In this process, the company had experienced many difficulties. Although Coloplast had by 2011 successfully identified and changed the critical issues created by the offshoring initiatives, the executive management now faced a substantial challenge in understanding what Coloplast had learned over the last 10 years and how it could excel based on this history.

This case describes the organizational and strategic challenges of outsourcing research and development (R&D) activities from Denmark to China. Nokia Denmark was founded in 1996 as a subsidiary of the Nokia Corporation and contained the largest Nokia R&D unit, concentrating on the development of mobile phones, outside Finland. In 2007, Nokia Denmark received instructions from corporate headquarters to drastically increase the number of mobile phones developed. Motivated by the need to alleviate pressure on its in-house capacity, Nokia Denmark outsourced certain product development projects to the Taiwanese company Foxconn in a joint R&D (JRD) setup. Foxconn, one of the world’s largest electronic component manufacturers, which was also developing products for many of Nokia’s competitors, was given the responsibility of developing and testing selected standardized and less complex mobile phones. However, by 2010 Foxconn had become a central figure in Nokia Denmark’s product development process with responsibility for increasingly complex projects. <br><br>Given the growing importance of Foxconn for Nokia Denmark, the rising pressure from the corporate headquarters, and the competitive market environment, Nokia Demark thus faced the question of how to proceed with the JRD. Three alternatives were outlined for the future of Nokia Denmark’s JRD with Foxconn: the management could decide on scaling up, phasing out, or continuing the status quo.

In the fall of 1996, Bestseller became one of the first international fashion companies to enter the Chinese retail market. Earlier that year, Allan Warburg and Dan Friis had made contact with the CEO of Bestseller A/S, Troels Holch Povlsen, regarding the prospect of selling Bestseller brands in China, where they felt there were many business opportunities. Holch Povlsen found himself convinced by the two entrepreneurs’ enthusiasm for the Chinese market.<br><br>They quickly proved that they had been right about China. A decade after the first store opened, Bestseller China had almost 2,000 stores, and accounted for more than one-third of the total turnover of Bestseller A/S. The secret to Bestseller China’s extraordinary success was its ability to sell price-competitive European designs with a Chinese touch, which was achieved by locating all production in China and modifying Bestseller A/S’s designs to suit the size and tastes of Chinese middle-class consumers. With a 10-year headstart over potential competitors, Bestseller China had by the end of 2007 managed to establish a strong presence in China. However, high economic growth and the growing middle class were making the Chinese market highly attractive for other companies. Although global giants, such as Zara and H&M, were devoting big chunks of their budgets to entering China and capturing market share, these aggressive new entrants were not Bestseller China’s biggest concern. In fact, the competition from local companies was seen as the real threat.

Risking becoming the target of a hostile takeover or being cornered as a small regional player in the global beer industry, the Danish brewery Carlsberg decided in the early 2000s to expand into rapidly growing emerging markets to pursue new arenas of growth. By 2008, this strategy had paid off, and Carlsberg was positioned among the five largest breweries in the world. In the Russian market — one of the fastest-growing markets in the world — Carlsberg had become the market leader. In China — the world’s largest beer market in terms of size and population — the company had achieved a 55 per cent market share in Western China, and operated 20 brewery plants with approximately 5,000 employees. The ambitious acquisition strategy applied in emerging markets had become essential to Carlsberg’s business in relation to future growth and profits. Accordingly, the case focuses on Carlsberg’s entry into China, which started as a commercial failure in the eastern part of the country, but subsequently developed successfully in the west.

The last year's rather adventurous journey from 2004 to 2009 had taught the fifth-largest toy-maker in the world - the LEGO Group - the importance of managing the global supply chain effectively. In order to survive the largest internal financial crisis in its roughly 70 years of existence, the management had, among many initiatives, decided to offshore and outsource a major chunk of its production to Flextronics. In this pursuit of rapid cost-cutting sourcing advantages, the LEGO Group planned to license out as much as 80 per cent of its production besides closing down major parts of the production in high cost countries. Confident with the prospects of the new partnership, the company signed a long-term contract with Flextronics. This decision eventually proved itself to have been too hasty, however. Merely three years after the contracts were signed, LEGO management announced that it would phase out the entire sourcing collaboration with Flextronics. This sudden change in its sourcing strategy posed LEGO management with a number of caveats. Despite the bright forecasts, the collaboration did not fulfill the initial expectations, and the company needed to understand why this had happened. Secondly, what could LEGO management have done differently?

With a change in management in 2005 came a radical reorganization and the announcement of several new strategic initiatives. Among the initiatives was the establishment of the Vestas Technology research and development (R&D) business unit with an aim of achieving global leadership in all core technology areas and, consequently, strengthening the core competence for the company. By 2008, Vestas had succeeded in setting up a global R&D network with R&D centres in Denmark, the United Kingdom, Singapore and India, and, in early 2009, a centre was opened in the United States. This transformed Vestas into a high-tech company and put a greater emphasis on its technological innovations.