In January 2019, the telecommunications industry was under severe threat of disruption. Telecommunications companies (telcos), which had historically been able to cope with technological disruption by moving from first-generation through to fifth-generation cellular network technologies, were now threatened by digital service providers (DSPs)—firms that came with a new business model that threatened the telcos’ existing business models. Telcos were .....more

In just a decade, the Danish health care product manufacturer Coloplast underwent a major transformation from a local Danish manufacturing company to a truly multinational corporation. In 2001, Coloplast conducted all its production in-house in three production facilities in Denmark. Ten years later, the company had relocated almost 90 per cent of the production to four different countries, with the majority in Hungary and China. However, a transformation .....more

This case describes the organizational and strategic challenges of outsourcing research and development (R&D) activities from Denmark to China. Nokia Denmark was founded in 1996 as a subsidiary of the Nokia Corporation and contained the largest Nokia R&D unit, concentrating on the development of mobile phones, outside Finland. In 2007, Nokia Denmark received instructions from corporate headquarters to drastically increase the number of mobile .....more

Teaching note for product 9B11M114

Teaching note for product 9B11M009.

Risking becoming the target of a hostile takeover or alternatively, being cornered as a small regional player in the global beer industry, the Danish brewery Carlsberg decided in the early 2000s to expand into the rapidly growing emerging market to pursue new arenas of growth. By 2008, this strategy had paid off, and Carlsberg was positioned amongst the five largest breweries in the world. In the Russian market - one of the fastest growing markets .....more

The last year's rather adventurous journey from 2004 to 2009 had taught the fifth-largest toy-maker in the world - the LEGO Group - the importance of managing the global supply chain effectively. In order to survive the largest internal financial crisis in its roughly 70 years of existence, the management had, among many initiatives, decided to offshore and outsource a major chunk of its production to Flextronics. In this pursuit of rapid cost-cutting .....more