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Aglaia Kong, the founder and chief executive officer of Guangdong LeapFive Technology Co. Ltd., a Chinese fabless chip design start-up, is facing a broken supply chain, with issues running from electronic design automation and core internet protocol through to fabrication, packaging, and testing in bringing up her Internet of things chip sets for industrial applications. Using fifth-generation open-source reduced instruction set computing instruction set architecture, she must assess a supply chain buffeted by severe bullwhip shortages and political headwinds, analyze her company's strategy, and plot a course to assure it will be among the 2 per cent of Chinese chip start-ups that do not fail.

Based in South Africa, United Exports was a leading producer of blueberry varieties. In April 2022, the company faced an issue of competitive positioning and entry in a crowded US market. The chief executive officer of United Exports, Americas, was preparing for a strategic planning meeting where the goal was to develop actions to grow the company and expand distribution in the United States. United Exports’ OZblu brand had simultaneously attempted to create year-round blueberry supplies and to shorten its supply chains by selling Florida-grown blueberries in the United States. The CEO knew he had to rethink supply chains in a post-pandemic world and in light of shifting consumer buyer behaviour realities. He had to find a way to best enter the US fruit produce e-commerce market while aligning with United Exports’ values and selling proposition. The CEO needed to examine and carefully consider e-commerce models, including subscription, rapid delivery, and the online grocery landscape.

James Han, director of strategy and planning at CHINT Group, needed to select the new country manager for the group's branch in Saudi Arabia. The branch was expected to become CHINT's regional hub for the Middle Eastern market, but the incumbent country manager lacked the necessary leadership skills. Han was considering two candidates: Wendy Sun, the country manager in Turkey, and Jack Ma, the country manager in Egypt. Both branches had achieved outstanding business growth under the leadership of Sun and Ma, respectively. Han needed to evaluate their capabilities and decide who was a better fit for the target market and the local team in Saudi Arabia, while also taking into account the cost of replacing them at their respective branches.

Initially making its name as the backbone technology of Bitcoin, blockchain has been referred to as a distributed ledger, public database, Internet of value, digital infrastructure, network, and platform. Compared with fluctuating cryptocurrency and non-fungible token (NFT) markets, applications of blockchain technology in more diverse business scenarios have received less attention. By analyzing 16 international business use cases under eight categories of blockchain-based solutions, this article offers a contextualized understanding of the potential for blockchain to become a general-purpose technology (GPT). It discusses how the extensiveness, evolvability, and enabling (3Es) aspects of blockchain influence the value, vision, and viability (3Vs) required for successful real-world applications. The article discusses how firms can draw on lessons from failed cases and good practices of existing cases to enhance the 3Vs for blockchain adoption.

Inter IKEA Systems B.V. (IKEA) entered Korea at a relatively late stage of its global expansion and encountered an overwhelmingly positive customer response, which emboldened it to open several additional stores at a relatively fast pace. However, IKEA encountered much stronger headwinds after the COVID-19 pandemic hit Korea. It had to shift to online sales channels, mitigate customer dissatisfaction, face aggressive Korean competitors, accommodate a major slump in furniture demand, and address employee dissatisfaction and strong demands from its labour union. What could the company do to address these challenges and renew its success?

Inter IKEA Systems B.V. (IKEA) entered Korea at a relatively late stage of its global expansion and encountered an overwhelmingly positive customer response, which emboldened it to open several additional stores at a relatively fast pace. However, IKEA encountered much stronger headwinds after the COVID-19 pandemic hit Korea. It had to shift to online sales channels, mitigate customer dissatisfaction, face aggressive Korean competitors, accommodate a major slump in furniture demand, and address employee dissatisfaction and strong demands from its labour union. What could the company do to address these challenges and renew its success?

In June 2022, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Worn Again Technologies (Worn Again), a polymer recycling technology company based in London, United Kingdom, was examining the way forward with a new technology that the company had developed and fine-tuned. The technology had been tested successfully at the company’s demonstration plant in Switzerland and was capable of processing fifty thousand tons of material per year. The CEO now needed to find new markets where the technology could be set up and scaled for commercialization.

In 2021, Robert, a highly qualified immigrant from the United Kingdom, had recently joined PLT Consulting (PLT), a multinational management consulting company, as a junior consultant in the Tallinn, Estonia, office. This professional services firm had a strong international brand. However, Robert soon realized that the organization catered both internally and externally to more local demands. In particular, his lack of local language proficiency made the organization a challenging work environment for him, both professionally and socially. Robert raised the issue with his boss, who invited him to a meeting with representatives from PLT’s human resources department and his work team. What concrete steps could they suggest that would help resolve the situation?

Autosalon Klokočka Holding s.r.o. (Autosalon Klokočka), a Czech Republic-based car dealership, needed to change its business ways. A family-owned car dealership, the company was founded in Prague in 1988 by Jan Klokočka. In the last thirty years, the company had grown into one of the largest authorized car dealers in the Czech Republic by providing a comprehensive range of services to car owners. But the automobile industry had been among the most severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. As automotive companies braced for a revival, they had to be prepared to undergo significant modifications to alter how they operated and generated value for consumers. Despite its continuous expansion over thirty years, Autosalon Klokočka had been experiencing substantial slowdown and financial losses. In 2020, the company recorded a significantly lower revenue than in the previous years. By early 2022, it was still unclear how long the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic would last and how changes in customer behaviour and capabilities, supply chains, channels, original equipment manufacturer strategic choices, and other crucial factors would affect Autosalon Klokočka. As the company found its financial position vulnerable, Jan Klokočka needed to determine how to mitigate negative consequences and create growth opportunities. How could the firm adapt its existing business model to improve profits in the next three to five years?

In June 2022, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Worn Again Technologies (Worn Again), a polymer recycling technology company based in London, United Kingdom, was examining the way forward with a new technology that the company had developed and fine-tuned. The technology had been tested successfully at the company's demonstration plant in Switzerland and was capable of processing fifty thousand tons of material per year. The CEO now needed to find new markets where the technology could be set up and scaled for commercialization.

When Bill S-211 comes into force next year, businesses need to be prepared for it to have more teeth than critics predict.

Davis Bookhart, the founding director of Sustainability/Net Zero office, at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has an HKD 50 million problem. Four years ago, a fund was created to build a position of institutional leadership in sustainability from the largesse of the university's then president. Intended to pair students with research faculty and the university's operations staff in the development of sustainable, smart solutions to campus problems, the resultant program transformed the university's campus works into a living lab, offering an exploration of frontier problems in sustainability and an alternate pedagogical model to classroom teaching. Four years on, over 30 projects have been funded, with outcomes ranging from digitalizing the school's registrar to using artificial intelligence to build a smart monitoring system for the campus' bird population. Now, under new leadership and with its funding set to soon expire, Bookhart must reevaluate the living lab's impact and address how the case for a living lab might be institutionalized. He must also grapple with a broader question of what the role of the university will be in supporting early-stage innovation in China's now emerging Greater Bay Area?

This article discusses how Chinese multinational enterprises internationalize in an era of increasingly fractured globalization. It introduces new perspectives that identify and describe four strategic pathways these multinationals employ while acquiring strategic assets and building and leveraging capabilities to increase value from their international presence. The pathways-bouncing up, down, sideways, and back-depend on the multinationals' strategies and the evolution of their internationalization. The pathways are distinct yet intertwined and influenced by powerful non-market forces, including geopolitical tensions (U.S.-China rivalry in particular) and Chinese domestic regulatory intervention. These dynamics manifest themselves in globalization, de-globalization, and re-globalization shifts.

In late 2022, E-Mart, South Korea’s leading supermarket chain, had pulled out of major Asian markets such as China and Vietnam after experiencing poor performance, and the company planned to expand into the US market. In the Asian markets, E-Mart relied on a direct entry mode, but in the US it changed its mode of entry by acquiring local companies and planning to open new grocery brand stores. Although the US market has substantial growth opportunities due to its large size, it is not easy to succeed there because of limited profit margins and fierce competition. Could E-Mart establish a foothold in the US supermarket and grocery store industry? What strategies should it develop to succeed in this new market?

LINE Corporation was started in 2000 as a local company in Japan focused on developing a mobile communication application. It later expanded its reach to operate a wide range of products and services in various markets including retail, entertainment, financial technology, and artificial intelligence. LINE Corporation was operating in two global markets—Asia and North America—with its top four strategic business units. The LINE mobile messaging application was the cornerstone of the company, launched in Japan shortly after the Great East Japan earthquake in 2011 to allow individuals to connect with loved ones, participate in relief efforts, and express their feelings through emojis and stickers. LINE FRIENDS INC. was a standalone entity created to sell and distribute character-related merchandise featuring the popular animal characters Brown, Cony, and Sally. LINE PLAY Corporation, the company’s popular avatar-building game, had over 75 million registered users, but some users saw it as merely a cash-grabbing game. LINE Next Inc. was a venture focused on developing and expanding the global non-fungible token ecosystem. In 2023, the main issue that LINE Corporation was facing was how best to allocate budget and resources to the two markets (Asia and North America) and to its top four strategic business units.

On July 2022, Signify Health, a health care services company that was disrupting the US health care market with its value-based care provision, announced the opening of a new technology centre outside the United States. This was a significant first step for the company beyond its home country. The company had an ambitious plan to develop an international centre of excellence for innovation that it expected would grow to employ more than 125 people by the end of 2023. The new technology centre was seen as a critical step to develop new solutions and provide technologies that would enable the platform to scale up its business. However, the company had to make some important and urgent decisions, including where to locate the international technology centre and how to integrate the new centre into the wider domestic organization.

In 2018, Christopher Hay, president and chief executive officer of Hayco, the top contract manufacturer to the brush industry globally, had been looking for a new location for some of its operations due to over a decade of rising labour costs in Hong Kong, China, where the company was based. The company accelerated its search in response to the US government’s announcement of tariffs against Chinese products in April 2018. Hayco was seeking a location closer to the US and European markets where labour costs were still low for an initial workforce of over one thousand employees and where there was no threat of tariffs. Hay’s focus was on Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. Hay considered questions such as, “What is the best market to which Hayco could move its operations? Should it establish a new subsidiary on its own or locate within a special economic zone?”

In 2015, Hubang chili sauce was launched in China’s highly competitive emerging condiment and sauce market. Instead of undertaking direct competition and a costly price war in traditional retail channels already dominated by a market leader, Wenjin Lu, a local entrepreneur and the chief executive officer of Hubang, developed a unique strategy to achieve breakthroughs via online-to-offline (O2O) food delivery platforms, whose consumers were made up of a fast-increasing consumer base of Internet and mobile users. By 2020, Hubang had achieved an annual sales milestone of US$29 million and secured series A financing. Lu faced a new dilemma: Should Hubang keep strengthening its unique O2O channel through market penetration and product expansion, or should it reposition to enter the retail market with its existing products?

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