Glostra blog

In strategic management literature, the human capital implicated in a firm's employees has already for a couple of decades been considered as an important strategic resource (or asset) for a firm. Obviously, in "knowledge economy", the value of this particular type of knowledge has become increasingly important, especially in knowledge-intensive and creative industries (such as financial services, IT, or biotechnology)

When national governments and politicians make decisions about economic policies, they often shape the viability of businesses at the industry level.

The arguments presented against "Lex Nokia" become increasingly odd (see also my earlier blog entry).

The protection of corporate intellectual properties is an important issue for any firm, and particularly so for globally operating high-tech companies. Unfortunately, part of the firm's challenge is to prevent its own employees  from leaking corporate information and secrets to competitors. Even if it was only a fraction of a firm's employees -- perhaps 1-5% -- who might have the unfortunate predisposition to make leaks under certain conditions, the challenge is real.

Facing the "need" to bailout the country's Finance Industry as well as Auto Industry, politicians and industrymen in the US are puzzled over an important question: To which direction one should next take the industry corporations, as the bailout monies effectively give the government control over them ? This debate is -- for sure -- interesting also to other national governments which are struggling with their own finance and other industries (such as that of Finland with its pulp & paper industry).

In November last year, I criticized the logic with which some people calculated the valuation of Facebook corporation to be 15 billion dollars (see an original article as well as a further comment and a related article). I suggested that perhaps the fundamental value of this corporation could more realistically lie between 3-5 billion. Now, an interesting new piece of analysis arrived today: Valleywag news site calculated Facebook's current value to be 2-3 billion.

An interesting question to GloStra is how firms can or should adapt their strategies according to the societies in which they operate.

The academic world is often considered to be isolated from the real world. However, now that the world is struggling with an unprecedented financial crisis, one must (at last) pay attention to the role that academic theories may have in the real-world developments.

Why the Europeans will miss Bush? An Obama presidency will be greeted in Europe with enthusiasm, but as some Europeans have put it to me, "We realize that we won't have the excuse of George Bush."...  [Obama is] going to want Europe to stand up and do more... And Europeans will have a problem, in that they will embrace him, and they will not be able to say: "Well, this is the Bush administration. We have to resist."

The dynamics between a firm's strategy and finance is one major research focus in GloStra (see e.g. http://www.glostra.fi/research/business-model-evolution, as well as http://www.glostra.fi/faculty/hse/120-jaakko-aspara). Therefore, it is interesting to ponder what implications the current financial crisis and looming recession have for the relationships between firms' strategies and finance options, such as venture capital.