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This chapter explores the attractiveness of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) relative to other regions for trade in services by European firms. Businesses no longer just search for low-cost labor but also seek to tap into the talent markets of emerging countries in knowledge-intensive core business functions. The availability of large talent pools that can be trained and retained is a key deciding factor in the choice of an offshore location, as is the size and the depth of the female labor force. The study finds that the MENA region has the necessary market and labor fundamentals to become a viable near-shoring destination for European firms and that it has a significant advantage associated with its female talent pool. Nonetheless, it also has highly significant disadvantages, due to impediments that women face in joining and staying in the labor market. Overall, the findings suggest that MENA may lose the competition to attract jobs in this growing global sector.

In today’s financial services landscape, staying ahead of the innovation curve and being disciplined at enhancing core service offerings entail careful resource planning. A well-structured outsourcing arrangement can go a long way towards enhancing long term organizational strategic growth. In the post-2014 FinTech era, (i) strategic management with an innovation focus; and (ii) financial technology-associated risks, have brought about changes to outsourcing in the financial services industry. Presently, most outsourcing life cycle models in existing literature seek to provide comprehensive, yet industry-neutral guidelines lacking industry context and depth of coverage. A newly licensed financial institution deciding to embark on outsourcing but is uncertain about how to thread the increasingly complex FinTech and financial regulatory landscape, will likely find domain-specific outsourcing life cycle models useful. A more targeted financial services outsourcing life cycle approach, with a focus on strategy and risk management in today’s context, can contribute more effectively to the application and review of outsourcing implementation. This chapter discusses a new Strategy-Risk outsourcing life cycle model. This is an elegant and simple-to-use end-to-end framework which can be utilized by the financial services industry to guide outsourcing decisions. The chapter also recommends areas for future research.

Government support for partnering between BioPharma companies and universities is growing in the UK and some European countries but few studies have explored these partnerships.

Through interviews and a survey of key institutions we explored perceptions of key informants on industry and university partnerships. Study participants identified that partnering helped them to increase innovation in R&D and led them to adopt more open approaches to innovation.

Organisational structures to coordinate and support partnerships; flexibility in operational management to solve problems in establishing and running these partnerships; leadership, especially by investigators to champion and lead collaborations; developing organisational capabilities of universities; and creation of an enabling environment by governments were identified as the critical success factors for partnering. The challenges faced were identified as lack of funding for university research teams; pressure on pricing from industry partners; disagreements on IP ownership; asymmetry of industry and university capabilities in partnering; and lack of administrative support with excessive bureaucracy from universities.

Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) have become accepted practices and strategic choices for many firms among developed and newly industrialized nations. Why? Comparative advantage of countries and companies is the basic driving force for global sourcing. Labor arbitrage is only one of the several benefits offered by global sourcing. Global sourcing does have inherent risks — loss of control being one of the primary risks. What? The global market for ITO took off in the late 1980s. Since the beginning of the new millennium, global market for BPO has also been growing steadily. Even KPO market has taken off in the last five years. Over the years, the functions being outsourced have increased in scope and scale and have climbed the value chain ladder. ITO functions include information system (IS) analysis, IS design, IS development, IS implementation, IS maintenance, and sometimes the management of entire data centers. BPO functions include call centers, accounting, payroll, employee benefits, tax preparation, radiology analysis, films and cartoons production, healthcare including medical tourism and surrogate motherhood. KPO functions include research about company’s industry, business, and market. KPO requires significant amount of domain knowledge about a client company and analytical skills. Where? Outsourcing locations can be onshore, nearshore, offshore, farshore, multi-shore. Each one offers certain advantages and disadvantages. Choosing right shore or right shores requires thorough analysis of all factors in each context. Crowd sourcing is increasingly becoming popular. Cloud sourcing is steadily replacing traditional sourcing. How? Several arrangements are possible for global sourcing. These include insourcing through subsidiaries in host countries, joint ventures, or outsourcing to third parties.

Understanding and addressing risks are fundamental to partnership success in offshore IT outsourcing. This chapter develops and demonstrates a fuzzy risk assessment framework to effectively assess risk for a client as well as a service provider prior to entering into a formal contract. The sources of risk in IT outsourcing were extracted based on industry survey and prior research. A fuzzy inference engine which embeds human expert knowledge expressed through natural language gives a superior capability to this approach. The case of offshore software development simulated using the fuzzy framework showed that this method could capture imprecise perceptions about risk factors and quantify them effectively. It also showed that human knowledge embedded as intelligence could effectively map and quantify sources of risk into different categories. This assessment could enable objective comparison of different projects and informed design of contracts and thus lead to partnership success in outsourcing.

The aim of this paper is to make a contribution to the mapping of the vendor's process in outsourcing and to explore how that process has been built over the time. In addition, the paper aims at coming to grips with the fundamental issue of how an electronic manufacturing service (EMS) provider can develop its competences and capabilities to compete effectively and efficiently in this increasingly more competitive industry. The paper has been written in a teaching case style where the case of Escatec, a tier-two EMS has been presented. Escatec, have been adding various skills, knowledge and technologies into a set of competences that have been integrated into a well-structured process that reflects customers' requirements. Findings from the case suggest that the vendor's process is cyclic in its nature, with equally strong emphasis on getting the new and retaining the existing customers. Based on the analysis of Escatec's process and competences we propose that the key success factors for a successful one-stop-shop type of EMS are to 1) Establish rich portfolio of competences; 2) Integrate the competences into a process; 3) Ensure that process depicts the nature of the industry; 4) Develop a modular process that will enable capturing of customers anywhere along the value chain; 5) Continuously improve competences that mostly contribute to the organization's performance.

This paper examines the effects of “fragmentation,” defined as the splitting of a production process into two or more steps that can be undertaken in different locations but that lead to the same final product. Introducing the possibility of fragmentation into simple theoretical models of international trade, the paper finds the effects of fragmentation on national welfare, on patterns of specialization and trade, and on factor prices. Models examined include the Ricardian Model and the Heckscher-Ohlin Model, both for small open economies and for a two-country world. Results are as follows: 1. If fragmentation does not change the prices of goods, then it must increase the value of output of any country where it occurs and that of the world. 2. If fragmentation does change prices, then fragmentation can lower the welfare of a country by turning its terms of trade against it. 3. Even in a country that gains from fragmentation, it is possible (but not necessary) that some factor owners within that country will lose. 4. To the extent that factor prices are not equalized internationally in the absence of fragmentation, fragmentation may be a force toward factor price equalization. © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

Economic globalization causes an increasing international fragmentation (disintegration) of value-added chains, whereby firms outsource components of production to foreign markets. There is a high level of concern about unwelcome distributional effects. This paper provides a theoretical treatment of this issue within a general Heckscher–Ohlin framework, allowing for an arbitrary number of goods, factors, and fragments. It shows how a fragmented production equilibrium is disturbed by lower costs of fragmentation, and it introduces the concept of effective prices of fragments to derive general results that characterize the distributional consequences of an increase in international fragmentation occurring simultaneously in several industries.