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The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) (2017, pp. 14–15) identified that “industrialization is the seedbed for entrepreneurship, business investment, technological progress, the upgrading of skills, and the creation of decent jobs.” This placed studying different industrial sectors and their respective clusters, which are key drivers for economy, innovation, and knowledge creation (Slaper, Harmon, & Rubin, 2018), at the forefront of research. This chapter tackles the automobile industrial cluster in Egypt that possesses promising potential yet faces some challenges. It aims to provide an overview of the cluster, alongside underpinning its strengths and obstacles facing it. Moreover, the chapter displays the importance of the labor dimension in increasing the labor competitiveness of the cluster and showcases this through two cases of German automobile manufacturers that pioneered in venturing into the market through employing technical and vocational education and training. In conclusion, recommendations are provided to help in steering the cluster toward success.

Customers in business-to-business markets are sellers of goods and services on their own. Thus, business-to-business suppliers may exert an influence on their customers’ buying decisions when performing marketing activities toward the customers of the customers by employing the concept of “multistage marketing”. Multi-stage marketing involves all sales-related measures which are aimed at the subsequent market stages (“customers of the customer”) which follow one or several primary customers in order to influence the buying behavior of these primary customers. Although the positive impacts of such activities are known, business-to-business companies often exclude the customers further along in the downstream supply chain from their marketing plans. But in a business-to-business context, the demand is always derived from buying decisions made further down the supply chain. The primary customers buy products or services because they want to use them – directly or indirectly – for either the production or the sale of other goods and services. Hence, derived demand, which can be traced to the end-user's primary demand, can be seen as the basis of multistage marketing.

The most common form of multistage marketing is ingredient (co-)branding, which occurs when a marketer providing an ingredient or component to an OEM advertises the ingredient to the customer of the assembled product. In addition to ingredient branding, this chapter identifies several other forms of multistage marketing and examines the underlying dimensions and processes of the phenomenon. The design of a marketing strategy using the concept of multistage marketing and its preconditions are discussed on a theoretical basis and are illustrated through concrete examples. The chapter provides a number of best practice examples in order to elucidate the issues concerning multistage marketing and its application in a company's marketing strategy serving business-to-business markets.

This paper describes how “pre-market activities” shape the competitive context. Such activities are neglected in both empirical and conceptual studies of strategic management scholars. Thus, pre-market activities have not yet been covered in the concept of the “competitive context.” Pre-market activities let firms collaboratively prepare for industry transition; firms also collaborate in standard-setting and gathering a shared view of future competition. Therefore, pre-market activities also shape next technologies’ business ecosystems where product offerings are systemic in their very nature. The author takes a Hayek–Schumpeterian economic perspective. In other words, markets are taken as the processes of making, integrating, searching, and destructing knowledge. Such a perspective is applied to competence-based theory because competences are built on knowledge in a broad sense.

Trends in the car and aircraft manufacturing industry showed an evolution in the configuration and management of the production network. For instance, the aerospace manufacturing industry tended to be a closed system, competing on scale of production and focusing on maximization of own profit. Nowadays the automotive companies are developing open systems under the influence of globalization, outsourcing, and co-creation of value. Doing this with suppliers causes a shift of value from the focal firm to the supply chain, creating a value levering position for the so-called large-scale system integrator (LSSI). The leverage of value on suppliers introduces the value-leverage capability of the LSSI company. The capability of the LSSI to balance continuation, conception, and configuration is crucial for (long-term) profitability and competitive position. To express the value-leverage capabilities, the authors propose the variables “turnover per employee” (T/E), “research and development per employee” (RD/E), and “profit per employee” (P/E), whose (inter) relationship determines the capabilities.