Internationalization trajectories - a crosscountry comparison: Are large Chinese and Indian companies different?

This paper explores whether the internationalization trajectories - patterns over time in the level, pace, variability and temporal concentration of international expansion - of large firms from China and India are fundamentally different from those of developed country firms. A longitudinal cross-country comparative study of 256 large firms for the 1990-2004 period shows that, although internationalization trajectories of large and leading Chinese and Indian firms are indeed different, there are also considerable similarities between established developed country firms and the new firms from emerging markets, not in the least because they often interact within the same sectorInternationalization trajectories, Transnationality Index (TNI), longitudinal research, crosscountry comparison

The Partnership Box

The notion of ‘partnerships’ can be seen as a process in which partners commit to long-term, structural interaction based on a shared analysis that every actor suffers from a number of failures, consequently a shared vision of sustainability and a shared ambition that all partners should play a role in its achievement. The underlying idea of partnerships is that by generating additional knowledge and resources, results can be achieved that benefit all parties and which they could not have achieved on an individual basis. Collaborative advantage is achieved if the following equation is reached: 1+1+1=4. The widely-held expectation is that (cross-sector) partnerships provide both organizational benefits to their member organizations and create synergy to achieve effective outcomes for society. Partnerships, thus, have three basic dimensions: analysis, vision, ambition. Together they can be portrayed as a Partnership Box, consisting of eight possible building blocks

Partnering Skills - The need for an integrated approach

These are challenging times, surrounded by considerable uncertainti es. Issues are complex, interests are high and often conflicting, no convenient paradigms or ideologies exist anymore to guide the actions of people. Solutions to societal problems have to be developed and implemented in collaborati on with other actors. There is need for a partnering society. Effectively operating in the “partnering space” presents four challenges for integrati ve skill development: relevance, reliability, timeliness and sharing

From Platform to Partnership

Increasingly multi-stakeholder processes are being used in response to complex, „tough‟ or „wicked‟ problems such as responding to climate change, hunger or poverty. This development is also denominated as „engaging stakeholders for change‟ (The Broker, blog January 2011). But there is considerable confusion of terms on what „engaging‟ actually means, let alone that there is clarity on the preconditions under which this engagement can be effective in actually bringing about change. The Partnerships Resource Centre (PrC) focuses on (cross sector) stakeholder partnerships as arguably the most sophisticated way to address wicked problems. But not all multi-stakeholder processes can and should be qualified as partnerships, even when actors denominate their cooperation as a partnership. Not every „dialogue‟ deserves that term, whilst combining partnerships‟ and „dialogues‟ leads to considerable confusion. In practice there is considerable confusion even over basic terminology, which is detrimental to the potential of multi-stakeholder processes to actually address complex problems. Any study on partnerships will thus have to solve a number of terminological problems in order to be relevant. This paper elaborates two dimensions: it argues that the ultimate organizational format (Platform or Partnership) and the actual techniques chosen (normal or strategic stakeholder dialogue) need to be crystal clear. Depending on the nature of the actual problem addressed by the multi-stakeholder process, a partnership or a platform can be equally effective – as long as all participants use the same words, have shared goals and consequently have their expectations aligned. The organization fits the problem

The Collaborative Paradigm

Mainstream development and sustainability thinking in the past sixty years has largely gone through four phases. In the past sixty years thinking about (sustainable) development has been prone to some intense intellectual and practical turmoil. Especially in the first forty years, thereby, markets and firms were seen rather as part of the development problem than as part of its solution. Since the start of the 21st century however, awareness has grown that the complexity of the worlds sustainability and development problems, asks for joint approaches. Markets and firms, governments and NGOs, as well as firms and NGOs should work together to address those wicked problems

Cross-Sector Partnership Formation

A cross-sector partnership is a collaborative effort in which parties from different societal sectors pool resources to provide solutions to (perceived) common problems.These partnerships are often rather complex because of a number of reasons: (1) they address complex issues, (2) they are implemented under (often) uncertain circumstances, and (3) they bring together parties that each have a different language, a different culture, and different interests and strategies. This knowledge is not new, but has been poorly understood so far. Complexity is further increased by the factors that influence the actual formation of a partnership when they are not well understood or managed as well