Marcus M. Larsen

The Offshoring Challenge: Strategic Design and Innovation for Tomorrow’s Organization

Exploring Layers of Complexity in Offshoring Research and Practice.- Offshoring Activities Impact A Companys Business Model: The Case of BBVA and Banco Santander.- Entrepreneurial Globalization: Lessons from the Offshoring Experiences of European Firms.- Tracking Offshoring and Outsourcing Strategies in Global Supply Chains.- Exploring Processes and Capabilities in Offshoring Intermediation.- Offshoring And Outsourcing Of Customer-Oriented Business Processes: An international transaction value model.- Offshoring White-Collar Work: An Explorative Investigation of the Processes and Mechanisms in Two Danish Manufacturing Firms.- SMEs De- Or Reorganizing Knowledge When Offshoring?.- The Dual Role of Subsidiary Autonomy in Intra-MNC Knowledge Transfer.- The Challenge of R&D Offshoring: Implications for Firm Productivity.- Industrial R&D Centers in Emerging Markets: Motivations, Barriers and Success Factors.- Towards a Flexible Breathing Organization: R&D Outsourcing at Bayer.- The Service Offshoring Code: Location Efficiencies for German Firms.- The Exit Advantage: Overcoming Barriers to National Exit.- Climate Change and the Offshoring Decision: Risk Evaluation and Management.- Do Expectations Match Reality When Firms Consider The Risks Of Offshoring? A Comparison of Risk Assessment by Firms with and Without Offshoring Experience.- Offshoring of Innovation: Global Innovation Networks in the Danish Biotech Industry.- Global Operations Coevolution: Hidden Effects and Responses.- Transformations of Mobile Telecommunications Supplier Networks.- Broadening the Conceptual and Phenomenological Scope of Offshoring.- The Complexity of Offshoring. A Comparative Study of Mexican Maquiladora Plants and Indian Outsourcing Offices from an Institutional-Prospect Theory Perspective.

Exploring Layers of Complexity in Offshoring Research and Practice

In just a matter of a decade, the Danish healthcare product manufacturer Coloplast underwent a complete organizational reconfiguration from being a local Danish manufacturing company to become a truly multinational corporation. Beginning in 2001, Coloplast commenced the process of relocating major parts of its manufacturing activities away from Denmark to Tatabanya in Hungary. Ten years later, the company had relocated up to almost 90 % of the production mainly to Hungary and China, but also to France and the United States. This reconfiguration had given substantial benefits, such as access to lower labor and production costs, but also an important means to reduce redundant organizational layers and resources. However, a transformation of this caliber rarely comes without challenges. In particular, Coloplast experienced many challenges such as empowering the new subsidiaries, adjusting the organizational requirements and identifying the detrimental organizational complexities. As Coloplast’s Operations Manager Allan Rasmussen explained: “We had designed an organizational structure that was too complex, with complex decision processes, complex governance structure, and complex communication channels”.

Offshoring White-Collar Work: An Explorative Investigation of the Processes and Mechanisms in Two Danish Manufacturing Firms

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to explain why white-collar service work in manufacturing firms is increasingly subject to offshoring and to understand the effects of this process on work integration mechanisms. The empirical part of the study is based on two case studies of Danish manufacturers. First, the chapter finds that drivers of white-collar work offshoring in many respects are parallel to those of the earlier wave of blue-collar work offshoring, that is, cost minimisation and resource seeking. Second, due to the interdependence of white-collar tasks with the rest of the organisation, our results suggest that white-collar offshoring in manufacturing firms poses higher requirements to the organisational configuration and capabilities compared with blue-collar work. We conceptualise the effects of white-collar work offshoring in a framework relating white-collar work to integration mechanisms companies instigate to manage it on a global scale.

Organizational Reconfiguration and Strategic Response: The Case of Offshoring

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the organizational reconfiguration of offshoring on firms’ strategies. A consequence of offshoring is the need to reintegrate the geographically relocated organizational activities into a coherent organizational architecture. In order to do this, firms need a high degree of architectural knowledge, which is typically gained through learning by doing. We therefore argue that firms with more offshoring experience are more likely to include organizational objectives in their offshoring strategies. We develop and find support for this hypothesis using a mixed-method approach based on a qualitative case study and comprehensive data from the Offshoring Research Network. These findings contribute to research on the organizational design and architecture of offshoring and the dynamics of organizational architectures.

The changing geography and ownership of value creation: evidence from mobile telecommunications

Abstract Through an innovative trade-in-task case study, we explore how Nokia, which is historically one of the most important mobile phone manufacturers in the world, offshored the development and production of three distinct mobile phones at three different points in time. Adjacent to these processes, we find that the value creation in areas such as design and manufacturing knowledge has rapidly shifted away from advanced economies to emerging economies. Moreover, we find that the value added captured by Nokia decreased dramatically over the studied time period. Based on our results, we uss more generally the challenge of multinational corporations to preserve value and how the realisation of the benefits of offshoring must be assessed with respect to the altered requirements for controlling value-adding activities.