Scenarios to collaborate with emerging markets: Initial focus India

Due to competitive pressures in the global business arena, multinational firms have started to migrate to low-cost sources of labour and materials, which are typically located in countries that also represent emerging market opportunities. In the recent years, SMEs are also interested in doing business in emerging markets, which represents a bigger effort and risk for them as they have less resources and time to recognize possible ways to start new successful collaborations with these countries and surpass the obstacles that they may encounter when creating new collaborative environments . These collaborations not only imply business opportunities to reduce operative costs or introduce products to those markets, but also innovation opportunities with Universities and Research Centres. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to present different scenarios to support firms to define collaboration strategies to develop new business and innovation opportunites in emerging markets and identify potential risks supporting them to develop new successful partnerships in their current value chain. For each scenario, main potential benefits, risks and critical success factors have been identified.