International expansion is no longer the exclusive domain of large multinational corporations (MNCs). Internationalising small and medium enterprises (SMEs) feature prominently in today’s economic landscape especially, but not exclusively, in knowledge-intensive sectors such as software and biotech. How do these SMEs overcome their resource constraints and accelerate their internationalisation process?

The insights presented in this AIM briefing draw upon research conducted as part of a follow-up study to a three-year investigation into SME internationalisation in the software industries in Bangalore, India, and Scotland.

The fact that China is an increasingly attractive market and a magnet for foreign direct investment is not news. The unprecedented rise of foreign direct investment in to China - now running at over $60 billion a year - has created the largest array of international mergers and acquisitions, alliances, joint ventures and partnerships everwitnessed. These are clearly a major source of complementary assets, resources and capabilities for the Western multinationals and the local companies involved, who engage in a reciprocal give-and- take as part of the process of market entry.

The research reported in this AIM Executive Briefing examines British, European and US firms operating in China. There are numerous success stories and examples of how these multinational firms have overcome the challenges to establish profitable businesses.

In a fast moving world, one of the biggest challenges facing organisations is dealing with discontinuous innovation (DI). Most organisations understand that innovation is an organisational imperative. They learn to listen to customers and constantly evolve their existing products and services, continuously improve their processes, so that they are not left behind by competitors.

This briefing document and the accompanying 'self assessment' booklet focuses on at what some leading organisations are doing in this area it suggests 12 different strategies for developing a search capability to detect triggers of discontinuous innovation. These strategies are also useful for more conventional innovation, and all organisations should employ some at least, if they aim to remain both competitive and durable.

June 2007 top^^

The Future of Business School Faculty

Business schools in the UK play a vital role in the UK's economy. Over recent decades business schools have gone from being a peripheral activity of universities, to being a core part of their operations, with one in seven undergraduates and one in five post graduates studying business and management related subjects. Employers see business schools as a valuable source of skilled graduates and high performing executives. This AIM briefing examines the significant challenges faced by UK business schools in terms of faculty recruitment, retention and development, with data suggesting that there are worrying shortfalls in terms of numbers of PhD students graduating and taking up faculty positions in UK business schools.

May 2007 top^^

The Future of HR

The Human Resources (HR) profession is going through possibly the most significant period of upheaval since it became established as a distinct organisational function. The principle reason for this is the impact of Human Resource Outsourcing (HRO), part of a widespread move to outsource business processes.

The HRO market is predicted to grow rapidly, from $23 billion in 2005 to $31.7 billion in 2009. Market analysts are not always right, however. This briefing takes a closer look at the prospects for the HRO market - a key segment of the business process outsourcing market. Will HRO grow as predicted, and, if it does, in what way will it grow, and what impact will that growth have on end- users and the HR profession?

March 2007 top^^

The Importance of Meetings

Meetings, an understudied aspect of organisational life, play a key role in the formulation of strategy and strategic change within organisations. More importantly, the likelihood of proposals for strategic change being made, and how those proposals are received in the wider organisation, depends on the type of strategy meeting, and how it is conducted.

This briefing provides a framework for understanding the different types of strategy meeting and the effects that they have on strategic change in organisations.

February 2007 top^^

The International Success of British Companies: An Industry Perspective

This briefing examines the international success of British companies in the context of the industries that they operate in. It does this by measuring international success using global market share and international revenues and combining these in a matrix to create a visual representation of those industries in which British companies are internationally successful or not. The briefing also investigates whether these are attractive industries in terms of profitability and growth.

January 2007 top^^

Making sense of workplace performance

We live in a world that moves at a bewildering speed. At work we are bombarded by information. There is written information in the form of reports, team working documents, schedules, regulations, emails and much more. Not to mentiont all the information provided verbally in meetings and other face to face encounters. Plus all the visual information, designs, videos, posters, pictures etc.

Faced with all this information, individuals are unable to make rational decisions at every point a decision is required. Instead, to help make sense of their working environment employees construct simplified mental models of their world. They then use these models to inform their actions. Once such mental models are formed they can be extremely difficult to change; regardless of changes in the external environment. And they can have a significant impact on employee well-being and performance.

For an organisation to implement policies that improve employee morale, that motivate and engage the workforce, it first needs to understand what makes its employees tick. Our research shows that one way to unlock the drivers behind each individual thought process is a technique called casual mapping.

This study may have focused on call centres workers, but causal mapping should be an invaluable tool for assessing the drivers behind the individual actions of employees in other work environments, and in a way which allows explicit policies to be targeted so that they ensure employees are more engaged, and therefore benefit the organisation a whole as well as the individual.

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From Modern to Paternalistic: How does your firm type affect your performance?

This briefing helps managers and owners in small firms, and, in particular, family firms, to understand and examine the relationship between employment relations and performance. It does so by looking at the social context firms operate in and the resources they have at their disposal, extracting some key factors that relate to ER and the firm's performance and constructing a framework that places firms into seven categories.

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How Does UK Retail Productivity Measure Up?

Productivity is an important indicator of competitiveness and economic health. Recent debate about the competitiveness of the UK economy has focused attention on the gap between UK productivity of the other players in the global economy, such as the US, France and Germany.

A more detailed look at the productivity figures, on a sector by sector basis, reveals that the productivity gap varies across industries. It is most obvious in the UK retail sector, which is significantly less productive than the retail sector in the US, France and Germany.

This briefing focuses on retail sector productivity, and supermarkets in particular. It examines possible causes for the retail productivity gap and addresses the possibility that measurement issues may be responsible for the apparent difference in productivity rather than any real difference in productivity.

December 2006 top^^

'Who Does What' and 'Who Gets What': Capturing the Value From Innovation

The issue of who benefits from innovation is a complex one. The answer is not always the innovator. It may be other firms that are needed to get an innovation to market or even those who produce imitations and adapted versions of the original innovation.

For the innovator the usual advice is to try to protect the innovation as tightly as possible, usually through intellectual property rights and, if this is not possible, consider taking on other parts of the innovation value chain. Don't just create the innovation, but design, market and sell it, for example. Our research, however, shows that innovators have more options than this, new strategies that they can employ to ensure that they capture the most value possible from their innovation.

Our report provides a simple framework to help guide potential innovators, or firms considering how to best position in their value chain to be the next winners; we provide two decision flow-charts to help managers navigate an increasingly complicated industry ecosystem.

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Is Organisational Learning a Myth?

Common sense suggests that organisations should learn from their successes and failures. Surely a project that turns out to be a great organisational success should provide useful information that increases the chances of future successes. Similarly it might be imagined that a venture that turns out to be nothing short of disastrous should become an example of what not to do, with the organisation taking the lessons from that failure and ensuring that such failure isn't repeated in the future.

If only this were true! In fact, as this briefing reveals, organisations frequently fail to see the error of their ways. Success creates straitjackets around organisations, wrongly shaping future actions and leading to failure. As for failures, organisational politics and the blame culture in many organisations prevent people from acknowledging failures.

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Attention HQ: Strategies for UK subsidiary companies

It is all very well exhorting UK business to be more innovative, more competitive and to close the productivity gap with economic rivals such as the US. The problem is, approximately 40% of companies in the private sector are owned by non-UK based companies. In these cases the parent companies may not be committed to, or concerned about, the long term competitiveness of the UK.

The challenge for the subsidiary country managers in the UK then becomes this. How to manage the relationship with HQ in such a way that attracts sufficient resources and decision making power to determine the future of the subsidiary in a way that benefits both the parent company and the UK? The research presented in this executive briefing looks at a key component in managing the relationship between subsidiaries and parent companies: attention, and reveals a number of important findings relevant to managers of subsidiaries both here in the UK and elsewhere.

November 2006 top^^

The Asian Century: Opportunities and Challenges for the UK

There is no hiding from the economic rise of the developing economies, and in particular that of China and India. Leading global investment bank, Goldman Sachs estimates that China will overtake the USA a the world's largest economy by 2039. No doubt India will be close behind.

Understandably many in business and government, at a local, regional, national and multinational level, see the rise in China and India as a challenge and threat. Yet while such rapid growth undoubtedly presents many challenges to the developed economies, it also presents many benefits and opportunities.

This report provides valuable insights into what the UK must do, at a business and policy level, in order to make the most of the opportunities that are and will become available.

October 2006 top^^

The Future of Business Schools in the UK: Finding a Path to Success

Since the 1960s business schools have prospered in the UK. Now, however, there are signs that the success story is coming to an end. The future of the UK business schools is under threat from a number of different directions. Their purpose is questioned - they are accused of focusing on theoretical research at the expense of improving management practice and of turning out MBA graduates unsuited to the demands of modern day management. Funding sources are under threat; international student applications are expected to decline; a severe shortage of suitable faculty is predicted.

Business schools need to develop the right strategies to meet these challenges and secure their future? But what are those strategies? This briefing outlines four different approaches business schools can take.

July 2006 top^^

Acting on Information: Performance Management for the Public Sector

This briefing examines how public sector organisations can use performance data more effectively to support decision-making and produce improvements organisational performance. In particular it looks at the challenge of converting performance data into insights and then acting on those insights.

March 2006 top^^

Signing Up for Competitive Advantage: How Signature Processes beat Best Practice

Research by Senior AIM Fellows shows that while best practice is an essential component of competitive success for organisations, it is not enough to confer long tem sustainable advantage. it is merely the ticket to the game. Instead, other processes which, are idiosyncratic and unique to individual organisations, are the secret to sustainable competitive advantage. The authors call these processes signature processes.

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Biotech Clusters in the UK

This executive briefing, the 10th in the series, details the findings of AIM Fellows recent research into the state of play of the biotech industry in three regions of the UK and assesses the challenges for policymakers in promoting the development and success of the biotech sector.

February 2006 top^^

Give and Take

Collaboration between different organisational partners is often a complex process but one that is critical to the success of many organisations. The report has constructed a framework around the attitudes then towards exchanges of knowledge and learning. Understanding the attitudes and approaches adopted towards learning in collaborative relationships, is an essential tool to help manage the collaborative process towards a beneficial outcome for all partners.

January 2006 top^^

Intelligent Design

Design could and should make an important contribution to the performance of every firm. The design process is inextricably linked with innovation and thus with an organisation's competitive position. The truth is, however, that too few firms understand or acknowledge the role that design can play. This latest briefing document from AIM, the ninth in the series, highlights a number of key issues about the relationship between design, creativity, innovation, performance and competitiveness.

November 2005 top^^

Dealing with Discontinuity

The eighth in the AIM Executive Briefing Series: This report examines the strategies required to manage innovation related to discontinuous events as well as managing innovation in stable conditions.

October 2005 top^^

The Ambidextrous Organisation

The seventh in the AIM Executive Briefing Series: Whilst most organisations recognise the need to be both adaptable and aligned, they struggle to achieve it. The question is: How can organisations successfully balance the conflicting demands of adaptability and alignment?

September 2005 top^^

Leading for Innovation: The Impact of Leadership on Innovation

The sixth in AIM's Executive Briefing series: How can the UK boost innovation? How can companies become better and more effective innovators? A number of factors affect the level of innovation in the findings of a team of management scholars selected by AIM in collaboration with the Chartered Management Institute to investigate the relationship between leadership and innovation.

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The Cluster Effect: How clusters policy can make the UK more competitive

The fifth in AIM's Executive Briefing series: What exactly are clusters? In a global economy, regional economies are exposed to greater economic threats, but also opportunities. In the UK several strategies have been introduced to improve local and regional competitiveness. One important strategy is the promotion of clusters - geographic concentrations of expertise and economic activity.

June 2005 top^^

Making Best Practice Stick: How UK firms can increase productivity by adopting leading-edge working practices

This is the fourth in AIM's Executive Briefing Series: UK companies operate in an increasingly competitive environment. Yet UK companies are slow to identify best practices, and when they do seem unable to implement them effectively or sustain them. This report offers hope for companies seeking that extra competitive edge.

February 2005 top^^

Offshoring: Myth and Reality Report

Offshoring: Myth and Reality. What the Global Trade in Business Services Means for the UK

The third in AIM's Executive Briefing series: This report is an overview of the findings of a team of AIM Fellows who explored the recent trends in specialisation, outsourcing and offshoring of business services and their impact on the UK Economy.

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Pathways to Value Report

Pathways to Value: How UK Firms Create More Value Using Innovation Strategically

The second in AIM's Executive Briefing Series: In this report AIM Scholars identify 3 key strategies that firms can adopt to create more value; it addresses issues that go to the heart of improving the UK's competitive position.

June 2004 top^^

I-Works Report

'I-Works: How High Value Innovation Networks Can Boost UK Productivity'

The first in AIM's Executive Briefing series: This report focus' on networks and how these help firms become more innovative. This report is underpinned the Systematic Review from the April 2003 Management Research Forum on 'Where do we go from here?'.