Beyond these Castle Walls:

Three Strategies for the Open Firm

By Mark Purdy, Matthew Robinson, and Kuangyi Wei
Research report
July 2012

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

Companies used to have borders that were largely fixed and

impermeablecustomers and suppliers, for example, stood outside
the walls while employees looked out upon them. Today thats
less and less true. Consumers now often co-produce innovations,
suppliers are welcomed inside, and so on. While these changes often
bring great benefits to companies, they also produce headaches
for management caused by the surrender of control. In this report,
we lay out three strategies for managing the risks and rewards
brought about by this breach in the firms castle walls.
For well over a century, the firm has been
viewed as an efficient mechanism for
organizing capital, labor and other inputs
into productive activities. Firms grew large
because of the presence of economies of
scale and scope, and because it was often
easier to organize production within the
borders of the company than to use the
wider marketplace.
Recently, however, this traditional view
of the firm has seemed increasingly at
odds with the evidence of how firms actually
operate in markets. Spurred on by a raft of
new technologies such as cloud computing,
social media, superfast broadband, wireless
and remote mobility, the primary impulse in
most markets today is toward greater openness.
In these more open business ecosystems,
the borders between the firm and its
stakeholderscustomers, suppliers, workers,
innovators, and so onhave become much
more permeable and reconfigurable. New
market mechanisms and intermediaries are
arising as consumers discover new ways

to cluster together for the purposes of

production, consumption, or innovation.
The sharp distinction between customer
and producer, for example, is increasingly
eroded as consumers engage in forms
of co-production, either with firms or
other like-minded consumers. Innovation
is shifting from the laboratory to the
community, as firms draw on the creative
capacities of the crowd to fire their
innovation engines.
In short, the notion of the firm is evolving
from that of an organization with relatively
well-defined and insulated borders toward
that of an interconnected enterprise
defined by the porous nature of its external
boundariessomething we term the
open firm.
But openness can be overwhelming. With
new configurations of capital and talent
and unfamiliar sources of competition,
many business leaders are exposed outside
their comfort zone and fear the complexity
of relationship management, attenuation
of organizational control, hemorrhage
of intellectual property, and even dilution
of brand that these may be bring.

2 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Businesses need to be able to maximize

the benefits of openness while limiting
the risks. This calls for strategies that
are rooted in the new market reality. In
the rest of the article, we will propose
three strategies based on our research,
experience and observation.

The harbor and fleet

One way in which firms are harnessing the
benefits of openness is through a harbor
and fleet model. In this model one firm
the harborprovides a platform to which
other firms become moored for mutual
economic gain, much like a fleet of ships
in a seaport. The services provided by the
harbor company usually contain a large
element of fixed and sunk coststhink
IT networks, logistics and distribution, or
supply-chain managementthat would be
expensive, if not impossible, for the fleet
companies to provide independently.

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

The companies in the fleettypically small

or mid-sized companiesgain because
their fixed costs are drastically reduced,
thus enabling them to price at levels that
cover their average costs and become
economically viable. (See Figure 1b.) The
harbor company, usually a large enterprise
with significant excess capacity in the
service or infrastructure provided, gains
from lower costs associated with better
use of its asset base and by capturing a
portion of the revenue streams that flow
over its platform. (See Figure 1a.)
Amazon is perhaps the pre-eminent
exponent of a harbor model. Its success
was founded on efficient warehouse
management and procurement excellence.
Having built a strong portal to reach its
own consumers in the 1990s, Amazon
realized it could extend that system to
other businessesbecoming a harbor for a
whole range of industries and sub-sectors.
Because its profit margin has always been
centered on its technical excellence (it
could procure and deliver products better
than its competitors), it did not matter
to Amazon if it sold its own products or
captured margins while helping other
companies sell theirs.
However, harbors are springing up in other
industries too. Consider healthcare, an
industry that is being revolutionized through
technological developments such as the
digitization of patient information, health
analytics and mobile and home-based
delivery of healthcare. Such innovations
have the potential to resolve the perennial
problem besetting healthcare systems
everywherehow to improve health
outcomes while keeping costs under control.
Yet many smaller physician practices often
struggle to afford such systems because
of the large up-front costs.

Figure 1a: Economics of the harbor and fleet strategy

Better utilization of excess capacity enables the harbor company to move down
along the average cost curve and generate higher profits.
Price / Cost

Total cost

Profit (before)
Demand curve

Average cost

Fixed cost
Profit (after)

The harbor company

Quantity

Figure 1b
Access to infrastructures and business function standardization shifts down fleet companies
average cost curve, making previously unattainable operations profitable.
Price / Cost

Average cost
(before)

Profitable
operation area

3 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Demand curve

Fleet companies

Average cost
(after)

Quantity

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

Athenahealth, a company that provides

practice-management services for physicians,
has harnessed a harbor strategy to overcome
this difficulty. It has pioneered the use of
cloud computing to replace paper-based
medical record systems with a much faster
and more efficient electronic system for the
23,000 healthcare providers in its network.
Healthcare providersthe fleetcontribute
a percentage of practice revenues to
Athenahealth, creating a funding model
that is linked to their long-term success.
The harbor model is also gaining ground
in areas such as the management of global
supply chains, particularly as businesses
give greater attention to ethical sourcing
and sustainability considerations in
purchasing decisions. As global supply
chains snake across the world, supply-chain
monitoring and certification has become
particularly onerous for smaller companies,
creating significant fixed costs which can
act as a barrier to market entry.
Historic Futures is a company that has
created an infrastructure to overcome this
problem, providing information on supplychain traceability such as country-of-origin
of products and sustainability features
such as product miles and water usage for
smaller companies. It has developed an
online application called String, allowing
users to trace products back along the
supply chain. In effect, Historic Futures
acts as a supply-chain referee, providing
virtual infrastructure that allows smaller
companies in its fleet to drastically
reduce their fixed costs of supply chain
monitoring and certification.

The demand forum

In 2008, at the height of the global
downturn, two entrepreneursVin Acanti and
Jim Moranspotted a market opportunity.
In the recessionary climate of the time,
collective buying sites were finding favor
with cash-strapped consumers eager for a
good bargainsuch sites typically offered
special deals on excess stock of a limited
range of products, usually on a daily basis.
Customers benefited from lower prices
while suppliers found a welcome outlet for
unsold inventories that had accumulated
during the downturn.
Acanti and Moran thought they could
take this concept a stage furtherwhat
if one could aggregate the deals on offer
from a whole range of different collective
buying sites to offer customers a much
wider range of goods and services? The
result was the creation of Yipit, a firm that
bundles daily deals from around 130 other
collective-buying sites such as GroupOn
and Tippr, thus widening consumer choice

as well as extending the potential market

for suppliers and other buying sites. Armed
with a much larger customer base, Yipit
acquired the ability to target deals to
particular customer groups. It found that
it could also amass significant insights into
consumer behavior, using a mobile and
web application, Foursquare, that tracks
where consumers goand, by extension,
what they buythus providing real-time
localized consumer insight and enabling
significant scope economies in marketing.
Yipit is an example of our second model
of openness, the demand forum. It can be
thought of as a clearing house that brings
together the buyers and sellers in a market
for mutually beneficial exchanges. This type
of strategy is aimed at improving demand
revelation among potential customers,
improving pricing power and profitability.
(See Figure 2.)
Demand-forum strategies have been
deployed in the nascent market for solar
power in cities. With any new technology,
it can be difficult to identify a critical

Figure 2: Economics of the demand forum

Greater market exposure shifts out a companys demand curve, enabling revenue surge through
expansion in demand and better prices for producers.
Price / Cost
Supply curve

Demand curve (before)

Demand curve
(after)

4 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Extra revenue from

demand expansion

Quantity

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

mass of early adopters and scale up the

technology so that it becomes profitable
quickly. One Block off the Grid (1BOG),
a community-based program to promote
solar energy, uses a demand forum model
to get around this problem. Founded in 2008,
1BOG aggregates groups of homeowners in
a city that want to use solar power. Signing
up to 1BOG is free for the consumer; the
company negotiates discounts with solar
installers on behalf of consumers, and captures
payments from solar installers in exchange
for customer referrals and volume purchasing.
Any city in the United States is currently
eligibleall that is required is one hundred
willing consumers.
Some demand forum strategies go a step
further, actively bringing their community
of users into the design of offerings and
products. Take the example of Polyvore,
founded in 2007 in Silicon Valley and
billed as one of the webs largest fashion
communities, attracting 6.5 million individual
users every month. Polyvore enables its
users to create digital collages of clothing,
accessories and lifestyle products from
many different fashion retailers and brands.
In one case of group creativity, consumers
were given the opportunity to arrange
Calvin Klein items into their own fashion
sets. The benefit for firms that open
up their boundaries to Polyvore is
better demand revelation and consumer
engagement with their brand: Polyvore
users have created more than 20 million
fashion sets to share with users on the
companys website and social networks.

Multivalent sourcing
A third open-firm strategy centers on
economies of agglomeration in the supply
of factors of production, whether materials,
talent, innovation or capital. We term this
strategy multivalent sourcing, reflecting
the multiple bonds of connection that are
formed with a variety of stakeholders. The
benefits are twofold: enhanced bargaining
power in input markets, and informational
advantages in sourcing factors of production
such as innovation and capital. (See Figure 3.)
Let us consider these in turn:
Improved bargaining power: Consider
Prime Advantage, a B2B company that
offers group buying services to small and
mid-sized industrial firms. By negotiating
group-purchasing discounts with a number
of different vendors, it provides its members
with access to raw materials, components
and business services at significantly lower
rates than would otherwise be possible.
Prime Advantage makes a profit via a
subscription fee from members, while
suppliers benefit from access to a larger
demand pool of customers. The model
also serves to enhance bargaining power
in the sourcing of other inputs, such as
employee benefits provision.
Many small and mid-sized companies
are hamstrung in their efforts to attract
the best talent because small scale
makes it difficult to negotiate competitive
benefits provision. SOI, a professional
employer organization, runs an employee
benefits pooling scheme grouping together
hundreds of companies representing
thousands of employees. By establishing
partnerships with healthcare and financial
service providers, it can create economies
of scale and harness its collective buying
power to negotiate better rates for member
companies in areas such as health, retirement,
and worker compensation provision.

5 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Overcoming informational gaps: Most

markets are characterized by informational
deficiencies to some degreethe problem
of connecting those who have goods,
services, ideas, and capital with those who
are in want of them, and co-ordinating
that matching in an efficient way that
yields competitive prices and low search
costs. Supply-forum strategies are evolving
as an efficient mechanism for overcoming
such informational gaps and connecting
firms to the wider marketplace of ideas,
people and capitalthe essential factors
of production for any business.
Consider the problem of innovation: Here
the fundamental challenge is how to
connect those who have ideas with those,
typically firms, that have the capital and
infrastructure to convert those ideas into
commercially viable goods, services, and
business models. Open innovation models
have taken root in industries such as
pharmaceuticals, where rising costs and the
expiry of intellectual property patents have
propelled a search for more efficient ways
of sourcing ideas and solutions to scientific
problems. An early pioneer in the field was
InnoCentive, the first global hub designed
to help connect seekersthose with
challenging research problemsand solvers.
Such crowd-sourcing of innovation is
now evolving a stage further to encompass
the concept of elite sourcing, using
crowd sourcing to source ideas in a
selective setting. Take the example of
Edge Amsterdam, an organization that uses
both electronic and off-line platforms to
identify new talent in product development
and brand innovation. In traditional
crowd-sourcing, there is a significant risk
of hit-and-miss due to the large pool of
contributors. Edge Amsterdam selects
talent exclusively from arts schools and

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

Figure 3: Economics of the multivalent sourcing strategy

Lower input prices and better access to corporate finance shift a companys supply curve out,
allowing it to gain extra revenue through supply expansion.
Supply curve
(before)

Price / Cost
Demand curve

Supply curve
(after)

Loss in
revenue
from supply
expansion

Gain in revenue
through supply
expansion

Quantity

Better technology and higher quality talent enhance the marginal productivity of both labor and
capital, making a companys cost profile less volatile to market conditions.

Supply curve
(before)

Price / Cost
Demand curve

Supply curve
(after)

Loss in
revenue
from supply
expansion

Gain in revenue
through supply
expansion

6 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Quantity

other high-quality channels, thereby

limiting the pool of contributors to those
with known problem-solving qualities.
Napkin Labs, a consulting company that
specializes in crowd-sourcing of innovation,
utilizes the twin principles of selection and
voting to harvest the best innovations from
the wider ecosystem. It hand-picks a group
of one hundred potential innovators for a
particular project, both to ensure quality
of ideas and keep the group manageable.
New ideas and product concepts are then
evaluated and voted on by the larger
community, with Napkin Labs applying a
set of algorithms to identify and reward
the best innovations on the basis of
criteria such as commercial influence
and community spirit.
Multivalent sourcing strategies are not
limited to innovation, but are also springing
up in the sourcing of capital. Social
networking platforms are increasingly used
to connect would-be entrepreneurs with
potential investors. One such example
is GrowVC, a community-based social
networking platform that brings together
start-up companies with providers of seed
capital, with the aim of raising $1 million
for fledgling enterprises. Such strategies
lower search costs for both investor and
start-up, as well as increasing transparency
for investors who otherwise would lack
detailed information on the target of
their investment.

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

Implications of the
open firm models
In a multi-polar world where opportunities
are increasingly dispersed across geographic
locations, the need for businesses to excel
beyond national borders will become
more pressing than ever. For international
business managers seeking to optimize
their operations across diverse geographic
locations, the open firm models elucidated
in this paper bring important practical
benefits, including the following:
Scaling across borders: Many small and
medium-sized enterprises (SME) struggle
to make the transition beyond the
local or domestic market to regional or
international markets. In Europe, for
example, almost a quarter of European
business leaders see a lack of export
capacity as the most significant challenge
to SME growth. By enabling SMEs to
piggyback on costly infrastructural platforms
(in relation to distribution or sales, for
example) provided by bigger organizations,
the harbor and fleet model can effectively
lower barriers to new geographic market
entry and mobilize elusive opportunities in
unfamiliar localities. In addition, the harbor
and fleet model also enhances standardization
in logistical support, keeping supply-chain
risks at bay for SMEs with limited
logistical capacity.
Tapping into a bigger reservoir of regional
or global demand: Social shopping is
gaining prevalence in both advanced and
emerging economies. In China, for example,
there are currently more than 2,000
collective buying websites. With online
consumption on the rise across the globe,
the demand forum provides a mechanism
to help businesses tap into this expanding
reservoir of global purchasing power.

Achieving better market segmentation:

By increasing the clout of consumers
within market transactions, the demand
forum enables finer consumer preference
revelation and more efficient information
gathering that reflects up-to-date market
trends. This enables international managers
to gain a more precise understanding of
their consumers and conduct more efficient
and timely product design in response to
shifting consumer preferences.
Improving the quality, cost and availability
of factors of production: As the world
becomes more multi-polar, the distribution
of productive resourcescapital, talent,
and ideasis becoming increasingly diffuse
across geographical borders. Multivalent
sourcing offers a channel to tap into
these dispersed resources and tailor them
to the needs of individual businesses. By
connecting to disparate and dispersed
pockets of talent, capital and ideas across
the world, firms can improve the quality
and cost of these factors of production.
A further merit of multivalent sourcing
lies in its ability to improve supply-chain
efficiency. Through targeted matching
between suppliers and buyers, businesses
can effectively avoid traps and waste in
their regional or global supply chains.
The implementation of open-firm models,
however, also entails several challenges,
many of which stem from cultural, social,
and regulatory differences across national
borders. As detailed by Pankaj Ghemawat,
professor at IESE Business School, many
areas of economic activity remain essentially
local in character, with a variety of social,
cultural, and regulatory differences
conspiring to create significant hurdles
to cross-border integration. Recent history
is replete with examples of overseas ventures
that have foundered on such differences.
Some of the common challenges include:
The quality and character of local networks:
open-firm models are essentially networkbased, so international managers need

7 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

to pay close to the nature and quality

of networks in overseas markets. Is there
a tradition of collective consumption or
business co-operation through informal
networks? Are these networks transferable
to a virtual sphere? Are there deeply
ingrained habits of consumption or
production that are hard to change, such
as a preference for physical transaction
modes? Does the infrastructural capacity
exist to create virtual networks? Is there
a critical mass of users present to create
deep markets for production, supply
or consumption?
When facing complex and unfamiliar
relationships that hinder the cross-border
transfer of competencies, it is crucial for
firms to create the right networks and
identify key stakeholders. These include the
suppliers that provide the inputs critical
for the firms competitive advantage, the
distributors that effectively link the firm
with its target consumer groups, and the
competitors with which potentially to enter
alliances or joint ventures.
Complex patterns of local demand: when
an open firm expands beyond national
borders, the heterogeneity of consumer
preferences and purchasing power can
be more complex than in the firms home
market. For example, on-line collective
buying sites in the US and Europe typically
cater to middle-class consumers in search
of a bargain. In places like China, however,
the typical middle-class on-line consumer
is more likely to be in search of high-end
products associated with status and prestige
in society. The demographics may be similar,
but the preferences are very different.
There are two strategies that can help
open firms to overcome this unfamiliarity.
The first is through more sophisticated
customer groupings, using purchasing
power and cultural background, rather
than simply focusing on convention and

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

commonly used criteria such as geographic

region or common languages. This can
help firms to harness the power of the
virtual community and more effectively
tap into cross-border synergies.
The second is to adopt a hybrid approach
by incorporating some level of physical
presence. Having a physical presence is
not only an effective way of gathering
consumer information, improving data
analytics and testing consumer preferences,
it also helps to facilitate trust among
unfamiliar consumers by breaking the
ice. In addition, there can be significant
synergies between virtual and physical
presence in unfamiliar environments,
particularly in areas such as marketing
and distribution.
Business model replication: A somewhat
more prosaic challenge for many openfirm models is the risk of business-model
replication in local markets and loss
of elements of intellectual property,
particularly in jurisdictions where intellectual
property provisions may be ambiguous
or poorly enforced. A challenge facing
collective-buying sites in some emerging
markets has been the mushrooming of local
versions which can often negotiate better
deals with local suppliers. To overcome
these obstacles, it is critical that firms
constantly innovate to ensure that their
business model is ahead of the curve. Open
firms can also branch out into alliances
or joint ventures with local competitors
or start-ups to add local flavor.

Deciding which openfirm strategy works

best for your business
As technological advances spur firms
toward an era of greater openness,
businesses will increasingly need to
harness the economic benefits of virtual
agglomeration. Based on our research, we
have identified three types of open-firm
models that effectively tap the power of
virtual agglomeration. Not all of these
strategies will be right for every firm:
businesses will need to choose the best
strategy based on characteristics such
as their relative size, the nature of their
industry, and their degree of comfort with
ceding control. The summary framework
set out in Table 1 can help business
leaders decide which type of open-firm
strategyor mix of strategiescan work
best for them. Some of the key questions
for business leaders to consider in this
decision include:
Have you clearly defined and protected
your firms competitive essence? The
quid pro quo of greater openness in some
business functions is that a firms leaders
must have an even tighter grasp of the
things that make it uniquein other words,
its competitive essence and the ideas, assets
and capabilities that underlie it. What
should be opened up to the ecosystem and
what should be kept integral to the firm?
What is really core intellectual property and
how can it be protected in a more open
system? The answers to these questions
will be different for every firm depending
on its industry, competitive positioning,
and cultural traditions.

8 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Have you built the right networks and

do you have the skills to manage them?
As highlighted above, the ability to
locate, create and maintain appropriate
networks is central to the success of open
firm strategies. Open firms must manage
complex webs of relationships with many
different firms, customers, or input suppliers,
with varying degrees of attachment to the
core business. In such circumstances, firms
pursuing open-firm strategies will need to
put an increasing premium on relationship
management skills, alongside more
traditional hard technical or business
skills, in their approaches to recruitment
and staff development.
How will you maintain organizational
identity and loyalty in more open
ecosystems? As the borders of the open
firm become increasingly permeable
and connected to fluid ecosystems of
people, firms and ideas, there is a risk
that organizational identity and loyalty
may become attenuated as the ties of
common purpose loosen, at least initially.
Core values will therefore become
more important as the corporate glue
binding employees and also, increasingly,
ecosystem partners.

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

How do you manage reputation and

brand in an era of fluid open-market
relationships? Traditionally, firms sought
to exert tight control over their brands.
But with open-firm strategies, such control
will be more difficult and possibly even
counterproductive. Instead of working
against the grain, firms can harness the
power of virtual agglomeration to build and
strengthen their brand. Engagement with
customers and bloggers will be essential
to prevent fast erosion of reputation when
things go wrong. Firms can also look to
mobilize the brand in non-traditional
channels, reducing costs associated with
traditional (and expensive) communication
channels such as print and television, and
creating greater share of voice.

How do you manage increasingly complex

informational flows from a multitude
of stakeholders? As firms engage with
more open and diverse agglomerations
of consumers, suppliers, producers, and
innovators, the volume and complexity
of information firms need to manage will
mushroom rapidly. While partners in the
ecosystem will be critical to helping firms
manage such flows, organizations will need
to retain the ability to sift and protect the
most valuable and competitively important
information. As businesses embrace
advanced analytics, they will need to avoid
becoming entirely dependent on others
for mission-critical insight.

Table 1: Overview of open firm strategies

Model
Function
Economic benefits
Complexity of
Ceding of
Duration International
relationship
control
implications
management
The harbor and fleet

Making services
with a large fixedcost component
feasible through
better utilization of
excess capacity in
infrastructure or other
critical services

Reduction in
average cost
Increase in service
standardization
Acceleration in
asset turnover

Low

High

Medium
to long
term

Greater ease
of geographic
market entry
Greater certainty
in supply-chain
management
Improvement in
risk profile

The demand forum

Creating access to
a bigger and better
demand platform

Increase in
market exposure
Improvement in
demand revelation
Quality certification
and reputation
building

High

Low

Episodic

Expansion in demand
Refined market
segmentation
More efficient
and timely product
design in line
with local market
preferences

Multivalent sourcing

Providing better
accessin terms
of cost, quality, or
locationto factors
of production such
as talent, capital
or knowledge

Access to
specific talent
Innovation creation
and knowledge
diffusion
Collective
bargaining power
Access to
corporate finance

High

Low

Episodic

Enhanced
organization of
dispersed resources
talent, capital,
and ideas
Greater connection
with local networks
(in relation to R&D,
venture capital etc.)
Improvement
in supply-chain
efficiency

9 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

As the open firm replaces the company-as-castle, executives

will need to manage the trade-offs that come with diminished
control over operations, customers, intellectual property and
more. But when those trade-offs are executed within a conscious
open-firm strategy, the rewards can far outweigh the risks.

About the authors

About Accenture

for High Performance

Mark Purdy (mark.purdy@accenture.com)

is a senior executive research fellow and
the chief economist with the Accenture
Institute for High Performance in London.

Accenture is a global management consulting,

technology services and outsourcing company,
with more than 249,000 people serving
clients in more than 120 countries. Combining
unparalleled experience, comprehensive
capabilities across all industries and business
functions, and extensive research on the
worlds most successful companies, Accenture
collaborates with clients to help them become
high-performance businesses and governments.
The company generated net revenues of
US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended
August 31, 2011. Its home page is
www.accenture.com.

The Accenture Institute for High

Performance creates strategic insights
into key management issues and
macroeconomic and political trends
through original research and analysis.
Its management researchers combine
world-class reputations with Accentures
extensive consulting, technology and
outsourcing experience to conduct
innovative research and analysis into
how organizations become and remain
high-performance businesses.

Matthew C. Robinson (matthew.c.robinson@

accenture.com) is a senior executive
research fellow and leads the global trends
research for the Accenture Institute for
High Performance; he is based in London.
Kuangyi Wei (kuangyi.wei@accenture.com)
is an associate with the Accenture Institute
for High Performance; she is based in London.

About the Accenture Institute

10 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Beyond these Castle Walls: Three Strategies for the Open Firm

References
1BOG (2011). Retrieved May 23, 2011 from
<http://www.1bog.org/>
1BOG solar cities (2011). Retrieved June 2, 2011
from <http://1bog.org/deals/>
Accenture (2007, January). The rise of the
multi-polar world.
Accenture (2010, January). From Global Connection
to Global Orchestration: future business models
for high performance where technology and the
multi-polar world meet.
Agathou, Amalia (2011, February 19). The future
of Polyvore, the webs largest fashion community
[Interview]. The Next Web. Retrieved from
<http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/02/19/
the-future-of-polyvore-the-webs-largest-fashioncommunity-interview/>
Athenahealth (2011). Retrieved June 2, 2011 from
<http://www.athenahealth.com/>

Hutton, David (2010, February). Chorus hits high notes

for Lilly. Drug Discovery News. Retrieved from
<http://www.drugdiscoverynews.com/index.php?
newsarticle=3554>
Jacobs, Alexandra (2010, March 29). Fashion democracy:
The world of virtual Anna Wintours. The New Yorker.
Retrieved from <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/
2010/03/29/100329fa_fact_jacobs?currentPage=all>
Lee, Jennifer (2009, December 8). Looking for a
local deal? Go online. New York Times. Retrieved from
<http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/
looking-for-a-local-deal-go-online/>
Marshall, A. (1997). Principles of Economics
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books)
Napkin Labs (2011). Retrieved June 2, 2011 from
<http://www.napkinlabs.com/>
Polyvore (2011). Retrieved May 23, 2011 from
<http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/about>
Polyvore (2011). Retrieved June 2, 2011 from
<http://www.polyvore.com/>

Athenahealth corporate fact sheet (2011). Retrieved

June 2, 2011 from <http://www.athenahealth.com/
our-company/corporate-facts.php>

Prime Advantage (2011). Retrieved June 2, 2011

from <http://www.primeadvantage.com/index.jsp>

Athenahealth strategic alliances (2011). Retrieved

May 23, 2011 from <http://www.athenahealth.com/
strategic-alliances/index.php>

Prime Advantage proven savings (2011). Retrieved

June 2, 2011 from <http://www.primeadvantage.com/
aboutus/savings.html>

Coase, R.H. (1937). The nature of the firm. Economica,

4 (16) pp.386-405

Steinfield, Charles, de Wit, Dirk, Adelaar, Thomas,

Bruins, Arnout, Fielt, Erwin, Hoefsloot, Markus, Smit,
Alko and Bouwman, Harry (2000) Leveraging Physical
and Virtual Presence in Electronic Commerce: The Role
of Hybrid Approaches in the New Economy. Paper
Presented to the International Telecommunications
Society. Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 2-5, 2000

European Business Summit (2011, May). Europe in

tomorrows world.
Ghemewat, Pankaj (2007, March / April), Why the
world isnt flat, Foreign Policy, no. 157, pp 54-60.
Girod, Stphane and Rugman, Alan (2005). Regional
Business Networks and the Multinational Retail Sector.
Long Range Planning 38 pp.33557

Wang, Jennifer (2011, June). How Polyvore Became

a Trend-Setter in Social Shopping. Entrepreneur
Magazine. Retrieved from <http://www.entrepreneur.com/
article/219675>

Hille, Kathrin (2011, June 2). Groupons China venture

sets profit timeframe. Financial Times. Retrieved from
<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8c2433f4-8d17-11e0815d-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1Oa3C7RRY>
Historic Futures (2011). Retrieved June 2, 2011 from
<http://www.historicfutures.com/>
Historic Futures traceability experts (2011). Retrieved
June 2, 2011 from <http://www.historicfutures.com/
traceability-experts>

11 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright 2012 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2012 Accenture

All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.