Case Study on Emi

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In this case I think that EMI should either outsource or start a strategic alliance/joint venture with another company while slowly building up their own resources and capabilities by acquisitions or R&D using the huge lead time they have. They cannot fully internalize because the $6 million investment is already a huge risk to them and much higher costs make the investment very undesirable.

Another problem is that if they outsource or have a strategic alliance/joint venture, there is a chance the firms they are working with might steal their innovation and imitate or improve on it for their own. However, this problem can be solved by proper protection of intellectual property rights.

Therefore, I think this problem is solvable as long as EMI protects its property rights and create a private standard and also, since they have the lead time to work on building its resources and capabilities.

Problem 2: Lack of understanding of the North American market where demand for the EMI scanners are supposed to be will cause a lot of problems such as inability to spot sales opportunities, inefficient/ineffective marketing and inability to accurately forecast goals leading to ineffective building of operations. In the fast-paced technology market, EMI should know the market well and adapt to its changes, without knowledge, EMI will not be able to do so.

This can be solved by locating a new headquarters in North America, nearer to the demand. However, this may be very expensive. Another way to solve this is by training the organization about the market. If they start a strategic alliance or joint venture, they can tap on the knowledge on the firm(s) they are working with. But they may not be knowledgeable too and/or will be in control of the knowledge.

This is not such a difficult problem to solve because EMI has the lead time to learn about the market and establish a strong market position, however, it is still an important problem to address.

Problem 3: Shifting the focus of the company requires realignment of strategy with of players in the organization. This is an issue with EMI as historically, they had issues with this when transiting from times of war to times of peace.

This problem can however be solved with proper communication of goals to all players.