Competitiveness

Competitiveness is a priority concept for both businesses and governments. It is determined by the interaction of:

• the management of firm and industry resources, and processes,
• the policy environment governing business behaviour;
• the supporting supply side environment: finance, education, infrastructure etc. and
• external factor including the pace of technological change, political stability and international relations.

They interact, as shown in the diagram, to define the level of competitiveness of countries’ economic activities and allocate responsibilities to both the business and public sectors.

Being a broad-based consultancy, we help businesses to improve their performance and we help policy-making authorities to create environments that foster competitive activities.

Improving Competitiveness at the Firm level

At the firm level, our management consulting services help our clients improve their competitiveness issues by introducing improvements to their organisation, operations, technology, transformation, and acquisitions, supply chain and engineering management. We excel in advisory and implementation services for complex technology, business process and market driven change. Our web page on management consulting, scopes out the services we provide to businesses.

Competitiveness Policy

Government also play an essential role in creating and nurturing competitive activities as outlined on our webpage describing our work in economic policy. Policy environments typically evolve in a piecemeal manner and become too complex and opaque, without sophisticated economic analysis, to understand the structure of incentives it sends out to the business sector and the costs and subsidies it imposes on different sectors of activity.

We have helped many governments disentangle their policy environments to ensure they do not particularly disadvantaged businesses especially exporting activities. Without, exception our help resulted in significant growth of exports and GDP.

Supply Side Support

It is also important to put in place and maintain supply-side support, by which we mean appropriate infrastructure, adequate and reliable utilities (see our consulting services webpage) and access to competitively priced finance, sound and relevant education systems, accessible health services, appropriate housing, as well as business services to SMEs and start-ups.

We have specialist teams in all of these disciplines and have helped countries across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the Americas to provide and maintain such support necessary and vital to ensure the competitiveness of their business activities.

External Factors

There are many external factors also impacting on the competitiveness of domestic businesses. Many of these are beyond the influence of both businesses and governments but some can be influenced. Trade agreements can be negotiated to remove trade barriers; research and development programmes can be introduced to promote innovation and to facilitate the adoption of new technology; and information services can be provided to reduce risks. Our work with governments and exporters and domestic businesses has encompassed all of these activities.

Managing Change

The introduction of new ways of doing things within a business or the introduction of new policies or changes to policy nationally creates uncertainty, hesitancy and often resistance. We are acutely aware that moves to increase competitiveness can be compromised by ill-conceived perceptions. To address this, we have developed a practical approach to introducing change comprising a number of simple but effective principles which have been proven to work time and time again.

• recognising the resistance
• promoting agreement on the need for change
• fostering participation to increase awareness
• encouraging ownership of changes
• facilitating accurate communication to reduce uncertainty
• providing regular feedback to promote understanding

Some examples of our work to help countries and companies improve their competitiveness demonstrate the breadth of our experience.

• Export Competitiveness Strategies: Bangladesh, Barbados, Philippines, Ghana, Mauritius;
• Private Sector Competitiveness; Bhutan, Tanzania, Barbados;
• Benchmarking Competitiveness Trinidad & Tobago, Mauritius;
• Competitiveness Action Plans; Cote d’Ivoire;
• Industrial competitiveness: Namibia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi;
• Medium Term Economic Competitiveness: Strategy: Armenia, Bangladesh, Philippines;
• Firm level competitiveness: Poland, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Kosovo Kenya, Ethiopia, Botswana and Zambia.