Innovations are definitely to a large degree happening as a result of impacts from the top management of various shipping organizations. Several shipowners have come to be known for their commitments to innovation – implicit as well as explicit. The materials reported in this chapter are archival.

This chapter discusses the fundamental role of shipping research when it comes to “redefining” freight rates, as well as key decision-making processes. Cognitive limits are becoming increasingly important, and these “shape” innovations, including when it comes to buying or selling ships.

This chapter provides a status report of the shipping industry, including major structural changes, and key innovations so far. The chapter provides a natural extension of the introduction, and should be seen together with this.

This introductory chapter discusses major changes in the shipping industry, traditionally rather conservative and static, but now increasingly characterized by fundamental innovations and dynamism. Several of the drivers for these key innovations are discussed, such as technological advances, changes in legal requirements, effects from climate change, as well as economic pressures to become even more efficient.

This introductory chapter offers an overview of the entire book on the management transformation of Huawei. Huawei is now China’s most prominent multinational company and a leader in 5G mobile telephone technology, which will be rolled out across the world in the next few years. What makes Huawei interesting is its rate of growth and the level of detail in which we can observe not only the creation of routines but also the breaking of routines across most the major functional areas (management, product development, HR, supply chain, finance, R&D, intellectual property, and international). This makes Huawei an ideal case to advance the theory of routines and dynamic capabilities to change routines. Hence the book will particularly appeal to academics in the field of strategy, management, and business history.

The chapter discusses the crucial role that top management team played at Huawei to initiate, implement, and routinize organizational transformation. Huawei’s leadership always had a strong long-term orientation and it tried to strike a careful balance between dynamics and stability. It also relied very heavily on Western consulting firms to transfer best practice to Huawei. The chapter also documents Huawei’s constant structural transformation of the top management team since 1998 with the expansion of the firm. Huawei maintained strategic consistency by creating a new executive management team structure 2003 that relieved an overburdened CEO position through a more collective decision making process and later in 2011 by instituting a rotating CEO arrangement. A number of lessons from Huawei’s experience are identified that provide guidance for firms to facilitate organization transformation as they rise and face more global competition.

Most companies discover that management practices that work on a smaller scale no longer work when the company grows substantially. This is also true for the product development process. As Huawei grew, the firm experienced problems in terms of higher product failure rates, longer development cycles and increased R&D costs. It then turned to the consulting services of IBM to upgrade its product development processes to a larger scale. The integrated product development (IPD) system implemented at Huawei was copied from IBM’s practices. IPD’s central idea is that companies must expand cross-functional teams to perform product development and use standard processes and templates to guide those development activities. IBM promoted the IPD system by providing consulting services to other firms. However, most of them failed during implementation, and only a few of them actually benefited from the IPD system; Huawei was one of them. The IPD transformation completely changed Huawei’s product developing system and helped the company overcome its problems in developing products on a larger scale. The IPD transformation was a turning point for Huawei in becoming a world-class company. This chapter explains how the IPD system helped Huawei solve its management problems and why Huawei was successful in IPD transformation when many other companies were not.

This chapter offers concluding thoughts on the entire Huawei study – the totality chapters and commentaries. It offers comparative perspective by placing the firm in the larger context of corporations in China and to some extent in other countries. The comparison with many other firms throughout the entire book reveals that Huawei is among a select number of firms that are able grow at very high rates by continuously transforming themselves. Consistently investing at least 10 percent of sales starting on R&D at least since 1998 was an important ingredient of this growth. But the importation of western best practice routines and the steering of this process by the Huawei founder and the top management team underlie this ability to grow. Huawei stands out among many Chinese companies that internationalize by relying solely on organic growth rather than on growth through acquisitions. Huawei is also different from state-owned companies (SOEs) that dominate a number of sectors in the Chinese economy in that Huawei motivated a large fraction of employees by giving them shares in a profit-sharing plan so that hard working employees could make a substantial amount of money. Building all chapters, we provide advance management theory by articulating in detail the meta-routines that underpin Huawei’s dynamic capabilities. Finally, we discuss the challenges to future growth of the firm, including geopolitical cross-currents the firm currently finds itself in.

Internationalization plays an important role in Huawei’s transformation from a fledgling Chinese start-up to a powerful multinational company. Huawei’s internationalization is characterized by repeated failures, difficult struggles and unceasing learning by doing. In this chapter, we divide the whole internationalization process of Huawei into three stages based on the different challenges at each stage. They are (1) overcoming the liability of foreignness, (2) managing complexity to achieve synergy from a global perspective, and (3) changing from a latecomer mindset to that of a global leader. For each stage, we summarize and discuss how Huawei adopts routinization and de-routinization strategies to efficiently overcome different challenges. The managerial implications derived from Huawei’s internationalization will be useful for other multinational firms.