Sustainable Enterprise Performance

2The Process of Creating Product Offerings

2.1. Introduction

Globalization is the great economic phenomenon of our time. Opening economies, developed or not, to international commerce leads them to confrontation with outside competition. With one click of a mouse, at all times, all around the world, a multitude of actors decide to respond to offers, or to choose suppliers, on the basis of largely accessible technical and economic information, in a universe without borders.

It is a fundamental structural trend that will be generalized because it corresponds to a necessary phenomenon. No country could reasonably hope to produce every single good expected by its consumers, at least under satisfying supply conditions (cost, quality, availability) for buyers.

The first effect of globalization is that productive apparati from various nations, or groups of nations such as the European community, for example, are directly introduced to competition. There is a confrontation on product markets presented by firms from numerous countries, and the combinations of price and quality that best respond to consumer expectations are the ones that win.

If, as the OECD says, “competitiveness is the latitude that a developing country has under free and fair market to produce goods and services that satisfy the international market norms while maintaining and simultaneously increasing its inhabitants’ real incomes in the long term”, then globalization is forcing all countries to find solvent customers ...