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Geopolitical risks associated with the return of great power politics and growing nationalism have generated new challenges for foreign investors across industries. Oil and gas companies are well acquainted with such risks and have developed strategies to manage them. This paper reviews five of these strategies: divorcing ownership control from operating control in designing collaborative ventures; proactively managing stakeholder relationships; ensuring transparency and communication; diversifying risks while proactively positioning for emerging opportunities; and deliberately planning for exit should such an eventuality arise. Firms outside of oil and gas can draw on these strategies as they navigate the emerging geopolitical context.

This paper reviews five strategies that oil and gas companies can use to manage geopolitical risk: divorcing ownership control from operating control in designing collaborative ventures; proactively managing stakeholder relationships; ensuring transparency and communication; diversifying risks while proactively positioning for emerging opportunities; and deliberately planning for exit should such an eventuality arise.

This study identifies several strategies that oil and gas companies have used to manage geopolitical risks. These tools will be increasingly important in the shifting global political landscape.

Drawing on the experiences of oil and gas companies, this study has identified several strategies that companies can use to shield themselves from the risks that are currently emanating from geopolitics. While these best practices originate in the experiences of oil and gas firms, the ability to deftly manage geopolitical risks is becoming an important prerequisite for companies across industries.

This paper aims to report the findings from a longitudinal study of Indian business groups responding to the pro-market reforms that the government had initiated. It explores their diversification choices at the group level and the group performance consequences of these choices during a period of institutional changes (1990-2008).

Ordinary least squares regressions were used to analyze data spanning the 1988-2008 study period for 98 Indian business groups.

Results show that business groups that focused their portfolios in the early stages of institutional reforms tended to perform worse than their counterparts that did not do so. However, as market reforms became more established, business groups that made the transition from an unfocused to a more focused portfolio experienced superior performance consequences.

The findings underscore the temporal dimension of focusing and suggest that both changing strategy by refocusing business portfolio too early or waiting too long to refocus can hurt performance outcomes.

The long-term energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy challenges the future of oil and gas firms. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the world’s largest oil and gas firms’ strategies are responding to the transition.

The authors used content analysis of annual reports to examine the renewable strategies of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas companies. Data were analyzed using two complementary statistical methodologies to build a taxonomy of the patterns in strategic behaviors involving renewable energy.

Five transition archetypes are identified – three reflect an active pursuit of renewable energy, whereas the other two are more defensive in posture. The authors also find that the firm’s country context has an important bearing on renewable strategy. Both normative social pressures and regulatory pressures play key roles in influencing a firm’s commitment to a renewables’ strategy.

Using an innovative research method, we develop a new taxonomy to classify how the world’s largest oil and gas firms are shaping the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy..

Using an innovative research method, the authors developed a new taxonomy to classify how the world’s largest oil and gas firms are shaping the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of economic development on culture and the significance of cultural change on the evolution of offshoring of services and knowledge‐based activities.

The paper offers a conceptual model that links economic development, national cultural predispositions, and the future of offshoring service and knowledge functions. It builds on a range of academic literatures within these core areas to derive a set of propositions that offer insights into the manner in which the relative success and evolution of offshoring service and knowledge work would be impacted by a country's economic development posture and its cultural roots and value systems. The model presented here is also well complemented by examples from real offshoring projects to offer the reader a comprehensive picture of the central propositions put forth.

Several propositions, formulated at the multidisciplinary intersection of service operations management, strategy, and international studies, provide ample opportunities for further discipline‐specific and cross‐disciplinary examination of complex interactions of economic development, culture, and offshoring approaches.

This form of conceptual research provides the basis for more rigorous theory development and testing. The aim of the conceptual analysis was to begin linking nascent research in the area of service and knowledge offshoring to an area of research that examines the links between economic development and culture.

Global operations managers dealing with extended service value chains that include offshore service providers must not only focus on dealing with cultural differences but they must also identify requisite cultural attributes for evolving service center roles.

By integrating perspectives from service operations management, strategy, and international studies, the paper provides new perspectives on offshoring of service and knowledge operations.

As global integration between firms and countries continues to march forward, managers and strategy analysts will have to find new ways to deal with globalization. Many of the founding assumptions of multinational corporation (MNC) strategy have undergone radical change. In this paper we examine five trends that MNC managers must consider as they create strategies to compete in the contemporary global marketplace.

Presents a discussion on five key trends that include: the end of the traditional multinational company and the emergence of a new approach to structuring and coordinating cross‐border activities; the declining relevance of geography and emerging interconnectedness across boundaries as industries globalize rapidly; the new wave of MNCs from India and China and their approach to global competition; the increasing relevance of crafting specifically tailored strategies to compete in emerging markets; and the imperative to manage knowledge on a global scale.

Continued globalization is inevitable and there are few industries, if any, untouched by global competitive forces.

Present some of the key trends that are significant enough to warrant the attention of global managers in general and strategy planners in particular.

Reports that transfer of ownership from government to private hands is touted as the only way to eliminate inefficiencies in the public sector. Argues that the alternative approach ‐ increasing competitive intensity through decontrol of restricted industries without changing ownership to private investors ‐ is likely to provide similar efficiency gains. Examines this hypothesis empirically in the context of state‐owned manufacturing enterprises in India that face effective competition from private sector firms. Shows, from analysis of variance of efficiency indicators of a longitudinal sample of 108 firms over the period 1988‐1992, that increasing levels of competition trigger corresponding increases in the overall level of technical efficiency of state‐owned enterprises that face competitive conditions. Provides a persuasive case for introducing competitive markets as an alternative to complete privatization, especially in monopolisitc settings.

This paper examined the relationships between national culture and strategic behavior in the banking industry in Jordan and U.S. The study first developed a strategic posture and secondly a cultural profile for the top management of the research domain. The strategic posture suggested the readiness for strategic response from managers. The degree of readiness was correlated with the constructed cultural profile of the managers and financial performance of the banks. The study found significant relationships between certain national cultural strategic characteristics, (risk propensity, time orientation, and openness to change, uncertainty avoidance and managerial perception of control over the environment) strategic behavior and financial performance.

The purpose of this study is to experimentally investigate the trends in shock wave Mach number that were observed when different diaphragm material combinations were used in the small-scale shock tube.

A small-scale shock tube was designed and fabricated having a maximum Mach number production capacity to be 1.5 (theoretically). Two microphones attached in the driven section were used to calculate the shock wave Mach number. Preliminary tests were conducted on several materials to obtain the respective bursting pressures to decide the final set of materials along with the layered combinations.

According to the results obtained, 95 GSM tracing paper was seen to be the strongest reinforcing material, followed by 75 GSM royal executive bond paper and regular 70 GSM paper for aluminium foil diaphragms. The quadrupled layered diaphragms revealed a variation in shock Mach number based on the position of the reinforcing material. In quintuple layered combinations, the accuracy of obtaining a specific Mach number was seen to be increasing. Optimization of the combinations based on the production of the shock wave Mach number was carried out.

The shock tube was designed taking maximum incident shock Mach number as 1.5, the experiments conducted were found to achieve a maximum Mach number of 1.437. Thus, an extension to further experiments was avoided considering the factor of safety.

The paper presents a detailed study on the effect of change in the material and its position in the layered diaphragm combinations, which could lead to variation in Mach numbers that are produced. This could be used to obtain a specific Mach number for a required study accurately, with a low-cost setup.

Previous studies focus on the direct effects of marketing analytics on entrepreneurial performance, but few explore the underlying mechanisms. Drawing on affordance theory, this study explores pathways through new product innovation (NPI) for the effects of marketing analytics on business performance. NPI is a market-based innovation concept comprising customer- and competitor-driven NPD and incremental innovation.

Using survey data collected from UK-based entrepreneurial firms operating in the IT and telecoms industries, we apply confirmatory factor analysis and a sequential structural equation model to test the mediating role of NPI in the effect of marketing analytics on market performance and financial performance.

The results show that marketing analytics enhances business performance through competitor-driven but not customer-driven NPD. Although using marketing analytics to generate customer knowledge for existing product innovation may enhance market performance, this positive effect becomes negative when competitor-driven NPD is undertaken to improve existing product innovation.

This study makes significant contributions to the innovation and NPD literature. It delves deeper into the existing view on the positive contributions of customer engagement to business value creation, revealing the significance of competitor knowledge to enhance business performance through marketing analytics, particularly in the context of IT and telecoms entrepreneurial firms.