Business Opportunity of Platform-based Automotive Consultancy Bridging the European and the Chinese Markets

Abstract

The complementarity between the European and the Chinese automotive markets brings about considerable amount of business exchange with each other. However, the market participants suffer from low communication efficiency and high transaction cost, which indicates new entry opportunities for consulting firms to create customer value for the clients by making the inter-market deals easy and inexpensive.The present thesis work aims at putting the particular scenario of such opportunities into the theoretical framework of resource-based competitive advantage and tries to determine the optimal resource bundle for supporting the generation and exploitation of the new entry opportunities. Based on that, it further addresses a number of practical issues for the new entry exploitation, such as market entry strategy, marketing strategy, organizational scheme, operational issues, risk reduction strategy, firm performance evaluation and feedback, etc. The investigation reveals that the resource bundle shall contain not only knowledge resources but also several other specific resources like personal network and cultural adaptability, among others. It suggests a narrow-scope market entry strategy with which a service portfolio consisting of three different categories of consulting service shall be implemented in two developing phases of the firm. The marketing- and operation strategies of the firm are designed accordingly in order to be adapted to the two phases. An open innovation platform connecting consulting firms with technical specialists is discussed and recommended to solve the organizational dilemma between revenue and fixed cost for consulting business. Bootstrapping and resource planning are determined as the effective approaches for risk reduction. Iterative firm performance evaluation and feedback create further loops of new entry generation and exploitation for the firm.The present work contributes to the automotive consultancy community to the extent that it analyzed the specific situation between the European and the Chinese markets and suggested the possibility of adopting open innovation platform in human resource management in automotive industry.