Exporting in the context of the Extended Enterprise

Several specialists agree that innovation is tied to collaboration and coordination between stakeholders. The new economy presents some interesting challenges to organizations in the business-to- business (B2B) environment. In defining the enterprise, prior to the globalization of markets, organizations rarely looked beyond their own doors. This is changing.

While we frequently think of the enterprise as the bricks, the mortar, the salary paid employees, adopting the customer's perspective dramatically impacts our perception about what is our organization. The fondation of the new economy are the networking, partnerships and commercial agreements based on collaboration. This is Industrial Affiliate's framework.

To the customer on Export Markets , the enterprise represents a combination of business organizations and governments that provide good and services. Often called the "Extended Enterprise", this point of view looks beyond our company and represents the complete value chain for good and services.

In defining the extended enterprise, you determine which individuals and organizations you want to keep information about. You identify the kind of information you'd like to capture, and design systems that provide this information to the people who need it to facilitate your business. You might supply information to economic partners, employees, agent and distributors, partners and affiliates and prospective clients, which result in the extended enterprise.”

While we used to think that the most important stakeholders are the employees, the suppliers, the bank, etc., in the new economy the members of the community of practice are getting more and more influence. This point of view can change dramatically the way we communicate on the Internet to export innovative products, solutions and technologies.

We are changing our paradigm from a brick and mortar centric business environment to a knowledge based, clustered and internetworked world where innovation is perceived as the most important way to export and where the members of the communities of practice play a major role in the commercialization of new ideas, new products, new solutions.

To support communities of practices, WEB sites are becoming interactive communication tools where servers and Internet links and WEB addresses are replacing the brick, the mortar, the office behind the door and the street address.

Virtualization of business started more than 30 years ago with the MRP and ERP. The CRM systems increased in popularity in the 90's. Deloitte says that 2009 is the year of WEB 2.0 for the Standard and Poor 500.

The tools are available. This is why Industrial Affiliates currently implements export clusters based on communities of practices composed of economic partners, businesses, consultants, affiliates, prospective clients coordinated through code of ethics, policies and practices and leading their business through agreements, request for proposals, sales and performance based commission.