Academic Profile & Strategy

Why a Center for Strategic Management and Globalization?

Two important rationales – a phenomenon based and a research based – led to the establishment of the Center for Strategic Management and Globalization at Copenhagen Business School on 1 September 2005. On the one hand, the increasing process of globalization redefines the rules of the game for firms. On the other hand, the business economic disciplines, which can be applied to understand these changes and their meaning, are to a high degree converging. The Center for Strategic Management and Globalization represents a disciplined and focused effort to understand these new conditions for international competition.

The phenomenon: New conditions for international competition

The opening of new markets in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Asia, the integration of existing market economies, and the dramatic decline of communication costs across borders, have created new competitive conditions for Danish firms. The majority of Danish companies will be forced to reconsider how they organize themselves in a way that allows optimally to take advantage of the new possibilities. Typically, this will imply a division and fragmentation of the firm’s activities and lead to a new global organization of these activities. This raises a range of new questions regarding the optimal management and coordination of globally spread activities.

The Center will try to identify advantages as well as costs associated with the global dispersion of the firm’s activities. Central research questions will be:

What does it mean to a firm’s innovation potential, when production and R&D activities are located in different places around the world?
Can a firm better coordinate its globally spread activities, when pursuing a modularization strategy, in which companies seek to minimize the coordination task across the dispersed activities?
Which learning process do firms go through when building up competence and organization around global sourcing activities?

The research: Converging international research

The business economic disciplines, used in the Center, are converged, and to a certain extend interrelated.

Strategic management and international business are two disciplines very well suitable to form a central business economic field with much interface and common aspects. These are business economic disciplines, that each has gone through approximately 40 years of cumulative development. A long range of fundamental questions overlap; for example, much of international management literature deals with strategic problems in an international context.

To a certain extend, both disciplines make use of organizational economic theory. Transaction cost theory, for instance, is a very important contribution in both disciplines. Likewise, the research methods are very similar in both areas; both emphasize quantitative analysis and the respective research journals are relatively homogeneous and partially concurrent.

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Last updated by Sarah Biel 03/02/2010