ParisTech Review

Food industry giants develop very active strategies to maintain or develop their market share. In this context, there is a great temptation to abandon the competitive maelstrom of generalist offering and seek differentiation through innovative business models. Three recent strategies bear witness to this. Can a multinational escape from its own identity?

Logistics today is an activity that, while selling mobility, mainly manages immobility. Packages stocked in warehouses. Disruptive, emerging models, based on the principles of the Physical Internet, will be much more dynamic.

There was an idea that caught popular attention a few years ago: basic, affordable products from emerging markets for use in their home countries could eventually move up and disrupt global markets. But the record has been mixed. What does it take for successful innovation?

Increasingly cited in various rankings of innovative and fast-growing companies, Anaplan offers strategic planning solution that clashes with everything that existed until now. Accessible online, on demand, easy to use by non-specialists, its platform can simulate all kinds of decisions and accurately assess the management of various stages in numerous areas: commercial, financial, HR, logistics, etc.

We already knew the greenback, here come the green bonds. This emerging security, whose yearly issuance still represents only 1% of the global bonds market, has the wind in its sails. Used primarily by institutions, large companies and local authorities, it has just entered the reference segment: sovereign bonds.

The Chinese healthcare system is facing numerous challenges, which means great opportunities for those western players in the industry who have relatively mature solutions and experiences to offer. However, China is increasingly designing its own way, fully leveraging the power of digitization to bridge the gaps.

These days, a large consumer goods company has almost the same strong data productivity as a medium sized Internet company. Management in more and more companies hopes to manage users and data in the same way as Internet companies, then make decisions based on data. Nevertheless, colossal and dispersed data stands in the way of IT, management and analysis departments of companies that are yearning for nimble and real-time data analysis. Consulting firms, which were playing a huge role, have now lost the power to pile up data and provide insight. They don’t have enough hands for this. We started working with a leading fashion consumer goods company in China to build its data platform. It took us only six months to put together the functions to gather and analyze data, consumer profiling, member systems and external data tracking and capturing. We would like to share relevant knowledge in these three fields in hopes of better streamlining operations powered by the force of data.

Emerging as an experiment fifteen years ago, personalization has become today a central feature of e-commerce, whether in the form of customization of products, the boom of made-to-measure or the personalization of customer relationships using customer relationship management tools. But do we know how consumers feel about it? In 2004, Ahlem Abidi-Barthe led the first scientific survey on the subject. What has changed since then?

Different hierarchies of needs explain why, in the internet industry and other high-tech industries in China, there are both the Chinese way and the Silicon Valley way of doing business, and why some big American companies have been struggling to make headway here. High-tech sounds high-up, but for online service providers, it all boils down to understanding other people’s ways of thinking and doing things. They have to understand local governments, their employees, business partners, users and clients. Looking back, the U.S. internet giants that failed were simply out of tune with the Chinese market. They didn’t clearly see the importance of understanding Chinese culture; they talked to the wrong people in the wrong ways about the wrong things.

Cybersecurity is already top of the agenda for many corporate boards, but the scale and scope of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments escalate security risk, making it harder than ever for C-suite executives to protect their businesses.

The slowdown in international trade and the digital revolution converge to shake up global value chains, a paradigm for international trade since approximately 25 years. A value chain, it should be recalled, encompasses all of the activities that form a product or service, from its conception to its use by the end consumer. The globalization of value chains that began in the early 1990s opened a cycle that now seems to bend. On these different links, the way value is created changes greatly. Western companies draw lessons by changing their business model. But emerging countries have also entered the game. Ultimately, maybe only a few winners with a global corporate status will be left.

There is not a single day when we don’t talk about innovation, digitalization and the competition between startups and big companies. We might miss the point when we do so, because the fundamental shift occurring is not digitalization by itself but the complexity it generates. Complexity causes a reduction of our capability to predict and makes us need to reinvent the way we design and manage organizations. All our beliefs about business are rooted in a world of simplicity, where the causal links were understandable and the evolution of markets foreseeable. This environment led us to focus on one holy metric, that eventually became an obsession: efficacy.

For quite sometime now, genetically modified (GM) food has been a subject of heated debates all around the world. In India, media have reported tensions between farmers, domestic seed companies, and large multinational seed firms. One also hears controversies about approval or otherwise of field trials for new GM crops. But what do we know about the Indian consumers’ perspective?

In a world in which information, capital, and labor are no longer confined by time nor distance, nearly everything has an impact on practically everything else. As traditional barriers to entry crumble, organizations that once operated in separate universes now bump up against each other, competing, collaborating, or both in newly defined markets. The tag team of digital and complex systems is slamming business models and upending corporate cultures, nowhere more so than in the realm of communications. Individuals and organizations need more than merely manage technology. They have to master complexity. That means being able to step back and consider all of the critical components of system.

How to reverse climate change? The current discussion focuses on reducing carbon consumption. But the policy instruments and tools available today are neither efficient, nor realistic. Both cap and trade and carbon taxes are variations of coercive systems. They can work if they are coercive enough. But who wants to live in Green Stalinism? So if the stick doesn't work, better try the carrot. It is time to turn the creativeness of financial innovation into something useful.

Legal and regulatory aspects are rarely mentioned when discussing innovation management. But they do play a major role, and the analysis of the legal environment is a crucial issue. It allows smart organizations to implement original strategies… even though there are a number of pitfalls.

Henceforth, many companies are afraid of getting uberized. Now, this danger, which has its roots in the emergence of the web twenty years ago, can be considered neither as a novelty nor a surprise. So why is the corporate world so unprepared? A simple matter of denial or an overly superficial understanding of digital technology? In any case, it has never been so urgent for the corporate world to understand what is going on. Be it only to prepare the counter-attack.

One year after the IPO, Alibaba's new investments have started to impact the structure of the company. The group has adopted a modern and innovative way to exploit the funds it raised, shifting from defining itself as an e-commerce platform into what the group now calls an infrastructure for e-commerce.

Following the diplomatic success of the Paris agreement, we will need an economic success in the years to come. After the time of diplomacy, future advances now depend on firms and researchers. And it will not happen if the economic or legal signs are in conflict with the ambition of the agreement of December 12th.

Though BlackBerry has less than 1% of the smartphone market share today, it once had more than 50%. The question is how such a successful company could fall so far. Journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff provide many of the answers in their book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry. Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed recently had an opportunity to talk with McNish about what we can learn from the rise and fall of BlackBerry.