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This chapter introduces some structural frameworks and market-sensing principles. This knowledge is a crucial element in marketing planning and in defining the terrain on which companies compete — the opportunities and threats in a SWOT analysis. It draws attention to the environment in which organizations operate and compete, analysing it from two complementary perspectives. Part A of the chapter considers industry dynamics, focusing on understanding the nature of competition and cooperation in markets. Using price wars, it illustrates some of the triggers that initiate competition and the dynamics involved. The second part examines market evolution. There are two complementary reasons for examining the broad patterns of change in a market. One is that successful organizations take an outside-inside view of their business. The second reason is that many customer needs emerge from changes in the social environment.

The seemingly simple explanation of why a company invests overseas — to seek greater profits — is inadequate to provide satisfactory insight into the multiple rationales for establishing foreign subsidiaries. The omnipresence of heterogeneity and complexity as well as the need for disaggregation reappear as underlying themes as this chapter outlines the major academic models and theories as to why companies would accept the costs and risks of seeking to operate in foreign markets with alien cultures, often in direct competition with established local competitors. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to an extensive and unique list of “real-world” business and economic reasons that have caused FDI to be attractive to a growing number of companies in a growing number of countries. The concluding section is a case study of the automobile industry, a sector that can be used to illustrate a large number of the reasons for doing business on a multinational basis as previously discussed.

Two of the central hypotheses associated with earlier versions of the product life‐cycle model are called into question. First, on the basis of 100 years of US Patent Office data on the patents granted to large European and American industrial firms, the author rejects the hypothesis that innovations almost always originate in the home country of the parent company; internationalization of industrial research is found to be neither insignificant nor a new phenomenon. The second hypothesis, that international investment is led by technology leaders, fares better, being consistent with the data. However, the author makes an extended interpretation in order to take account of more recent trends toward a much wider range of firms being engaged in internationalization, suggesting that technology leaders are now ahead in the globalization of technology, and that these firms would be most competent in exploiting the locationally differentiated potential of foreign centres of technological excellence. Technology leadership can then be said to manifest itself in superior management of internal international networks with multiple locations for innovation, rather than just in a wider geographical dispersion of investments.

This chapter concludes that the chambers have shown remarkable durability by being adaptable to new needs, and diversifying their service bundle over time. However, the 1980s seem to have become something of a ‘clean break’ with the past. The causes for this are sought in product life cycles, shifts to a small firms economy, expansion of chamber territories to cover larger areas more thinly, but most important has been contracting and partnering with government. This has introduced far more instability than that in the economy, with changes arsing from changes in the party in power, administrative confusion, and ministerial caprice. For the future it is suggested that chambers need to re-emphasize their USP and develop stronger independent missions that maintain government links more on their own terms.

To survive in a competitive market, it is important for firms or industries to innovate and develop new products. Firms enjoying support and protection from the government will hardly spend time, money, and effort on innovation, whereas politicians aiming to get re-elected will aim to subsidize firms or industries that face the danger of becoming losers in the face of creative destruction. There are arguments which that posit firms can escape competition through constant innovation. In this chapter, the authors, keeping public expenditure in mind, focus on the national champions at different stages of the industry life. They argue that knowledge externalities generated at different stages of a product’s life cycle may justify the government’s intervention of promoting investment and efficient redeployment of assets.

Chapter two turns to a similar set of questions with regard to chronic economic distress: why do some regions face chronic economic distress while others do not, and why are some chronically-distressed regions resilient in that they are able to emerge from chronic distress? We define chronic economic distress and resilience in terms of regeneration and recovery. For the period 1978 to 2007, we provide quantitative descriptions and analyses of chronic regional economic distress and its determinants, causes, and consequences.

Chapter 6 covers the core aspect of what a nonprofit organization actually does: creates programs or services and delivers them to their clients. That said, there are several important issues to consider when designing products and services; namely, how they can be used to develop a strong value proposition. This chapter also introduces the concept of the product life cycle (PLC) and its implications for nonprofit contexts. It is vital that nonprofits continue to listen to constituents and continue to innovate, so this chapter examines ways for nonprofit organizations to develop new ideas and evaluate new ventures. It also provides a framework for evaluating existing programs and services to determine where changes can be made. Many times partners and alliances are important players in innovation, so this chapter discusses important parameters for evaluating them. Last, the chapter includes ways to increase overall innovation within an organization (and also discusses times when innovation is not right for the organization).

The concluding chapter focuses on the role of public policy in promoting regional economic resilience. To better understand the potential role of various types of policy actions, we develop a temporal framework that divides policy implementation and policy effects into three different time frames, with policies varying both in the time it takes to put in place and in the time frame over which effects, if the policy is effective, can be expected. Different kinds of policy actions are likely to be most appropriate and most effective in the different time periods and in the face of different types of shocks. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings, put into this framework, for economic development policy makers and practitioners

Financial innovation takes different forms and is evolutionary, making it difficult to predict its costs and benefits ex ante. It is driven by user needs, especially their desire to alter the risk-reward structure they face, as much as by financial institutions’ desire to reap the temporary economic rents from innovation, which are subsequently diffused through imitation and standardisation. Banks have an economic interest to mitigate the risks that may result from innovation for their clients and for themselves; product approval processes and dedicated risk management processes are crucial instruments for this. But as private actors have no incentive to include potential social costs in their risk assessments, public intervention is needed to address the systemic risk implications of financial innovation. A macro-prudential approach seems more promising to safeguard financial stability than product-specific intervention.