Submitted by: Submitted by CathyKe
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Words: 3655
Pages: 15
Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 02/21/2016 02:49 PM
Best Practice
BY DANIEL J. ISENBERG
The Global Entrepreneur
Tim Ellis
A new breed of entrepreneur is thinking across borders – from day one.
FOR A CENTURY AND MORE, companies have ventured abroad only after establishing themselves at home.
Moreover, when they have looked
overseas, they haven’t ventured too
far afield, initially. Consumer healthcare company Johnson & Johnson
set up its first foreign subsidiary in
Montreal in 1919 – 33 years after its
founding in 1886. Sony, established
in 1946, took 11 years to export its
first product to the United States,
the TR-63 transistor radio. The Gap,
founded in 1969 – the year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon – opened
its first overseas store in London in
1987, a year after the Challenger space
shuttle disaster.
Companies are being born global today, by contrast. Entrepreneurs don’t automatically buy raw materials from nearby
suppliers or set up factories close to their headquarters. They
hunt for the planet’s best manufacturing locations because
political and economic barriers have fallen and vast quantities
of information are at their fingertips. They also scout for talent
across the globe, tap investors wherever they may be located,
and learn to manage operations from a distance – the moment
they go into business.
Take Bento Koike, who set up
Tecsis to manufacture wind turbine
blades in 1995. The company imports
raw materials from North America
and Europe, and its customers are
located on those two continents.
Yet Koike created his globe-girding
start-up near São Paulo in his native
Brazil because a sophisticated aerospace industry had emerged there,
which enabled him to develop innovative blade designs and manufacturing know-how. Tecsis has become
one of the world’s market leaders, having installed 12,000 blades in 10 countries in the past decade and racked up
revenues of $350 million in 2007.
Standing conventional theory on its head, start-ups now
do business in many...