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The purpose of this paper is to understand the practices and policies unique to high-tech manufacturing start-ups in emerging economies, such as India. The study analyzes the main features and challenges of the high-tech manufacturing sector, and the way in which enabling environment including policy making, supply chain capability and related technologies through Industry 4.0 could be leveraged to foster growth.

The paper undertakes an exploratory approach through in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with high-tech manufacturing firms in various stages of their growth. The paper provides evidence of the challenges that high-tech manufacturing firms face in India, the strategies they adopt and highlights the role of institutional structures and policies.

Findings show that high-tech manufacturing start-ups in India face various challenges in the upstream, production and downstream supply chain processes. Further, issues related to availability of quality material, quality suppliers, contracts, funding and access to markets remain. Results also show that enabling operational and financial levers could be created by policy makers and other stakeholders to help the high-tech manufacturing start-ups scale faster and create value.

This paper contributes to the R&D intensive industry and high-tech manufacturing literature in the context of emerging economies, such as India, and provides a rigorous overview of the start-up ecosystem in high-tech manufacturing.

This study aims to explore the gaps concerning the organizational operant resources (OORs) of logistics service providers (LSPs) expected in outsourcing relationships. The study considers the views of both manufacturing firms (M-firms) and LSPs in India and DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) seeking gaps within and across regions.

This research employed a survey targeting executives from large M-firms and LSPs in both India and DACH. The perceptions about the importance and improvement expectations of 17 OORs are analyzed. A modified version of importance-improvement analysis (A-B), a novel comparative A-B analysis (CABA) method, has been proposed to identify the importance and improvement gaps in OORs between M-firms and LSPs within and across India and the DACH region.

There are more gaps between M-firms and LSPs in India compared to DACH. Cross-country comparisons reveal that LSPs in India and DACH have similar perceptions concerning the OORs, but M-firms in India have significantly higher improvement expectations than those in DACH.

This study proposes an analytical approach that enables managers to identify improvement areas and better align with their outsourcing relationship partners. It also highlights aspects that need to be considered while entering emerging markets such as India.

The analysis approach using CABA is novel. Also, among the cross-country studies, this is the first to compare outsourcing relationships in India with the DACH region while involving both users' and service providers' perspectives.

China has emerged as an undisputed leader of global business and as a preferred hub for global value chains. However, recent threats of the trade war, the allegation of violation of intellectual property rights and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to have dampened China’s attractiveness. Multinational corporations may be contemplating diversifying their dependence on China – a strategy known as “China-Plus-One”. What could be possible destinations in Asia for such a diversification strategy?

Towards understanding the “China-Plus-One” phenomenon, the authors use a methodology of arriving at an aggregate ranking of the major economies of emerging Asia. This is built on a few standard indices such as World Bank's Logistic Performance Index; World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Indicator; World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index; Economic Complexity Index of the Harvard University; Economist Magazine’s Country Rating of Financial Strength; and Corruption Perception Index compiled by the Transparency International. Accordingly, the authors rank seven countries (namely, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Bangladesh) next to China as possible destinations for selecting the “Plus one” country.

In the aggregate ranking, China ranks first followed by Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and then Bangladesh. This sequence gives some pointers on the possible shifts from China as potential hubs of global value chains. The authors observe the following: first, it is challenging to move away from China in the short run; second, corporations could pursue a “China-plus-One” strategy, whereby they may move marginally from China and relocate part of their supply chain elsewhere; third, in looking for alternative locations, corporations may look for the following countries in emerging Asia, namely, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and Bangladesh.

The aggregate ranking method applied in this paper is one of the first applications in the context of ranking developing Asian economies based on economic, logistics, supply chain, financial and corruption metrics. It is one of the first conceptual works in the domain of identifying possible diversification options for the “China-Plus-One” strategy that can be extended to include many context-specific rankings.