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Older workers’ employability is a Human Resource Development responsibility

By Silvia DELLO RUSSO

Together with a group of international colleagues from the 5C Collaborative (www.5c.careers), I studied employability, defined as an individual’s perception of being able to find alternative jobs in the external labor market. I have studied this subject with particular attention to older workers, as individuals are forced to work longer in their lives; paradoxically, however, as they age, they face great discrimination when seeking or re-employment. We conducted a survey in 30 countries and collected responses from over 9,000 people employed in managerial or professional jobs. By analyzing this data, we were able to show that older workers perceive a disadvantage in terms of external employability, but that having experienced development activities throughout their career mitigates this situation.

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Building Credible Brands in (Post-)Globalizing Markets

By Timo MANDLER

Consumers in Western markets are increasingly critical towards globalization and re-embrace local values. Companies thus must decide whether to continue to pursue global branding strategies and/or rejuvenate local branding strategies. To explore the implications of market globalization for consumer preferences, we use signaling theory to investigate the role of perceived brand globalness and localness as signals of brand credibility, related downstream effects and boundary conditions, across two countries with differing levels of globalization. In globalized markets, brand globalness is a weaker signal of brand credibility than brand localness, whereas in globalizing markets, the two signals are of equal importance.

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How will Covid-19 impact international trade policies?

By Louise CURRAN

As COVID-19 has spread across the world it has had major impacts on supply chains. It is reasonable to assume that the impact on trade flows may be even greater than that for the GFC in 2009, where world trade fell by over 20%. Most of this is an entirely natural result of the closure of many production structures around the world. However, some trade impacts are the direct result of trade policy interventions by governments, which presage a more major and long-term impact from the current crisis.

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Business Model Disruption and the Disruptor’s Gambit

By Yuliya SNIHUR

Based on a longitudinal case study, this paper presents an ecosystem-level process model of the interlocking key activities of the business model disruptor, other ecosystem participants (customers, partners, media, analysts), and the incumbent. Together these constitute a strategic process of ecosystem evolution from incumbent-centered to disruptor-centered. We identify the phenomenon of a “disruptor’s gambit,” where the disruptor reveals its intentions early on through effective framing, followed by rapid adaptation of its business model to satisfy ecosystem needs. These processes generate a virtuous framing-adaptation cycle, where feed-forward and feedback enable rapid response to customers and partners, while engaging them as force multipliers during new ecosystem creation. Our findings suggest that framing constitutes a dynamic strategic process enabling disruptors to reduce uncertainty, dislodge powerful incumbents, and shape new ecosystems through business model innovation.