Developing new avenues for growth: Challenges presented by five trends in the global environment

This paper documents five major trends in the global environment, and examines the impact of each on the corporate strategies of multinational firms striving for higher rates of growth in corporate earnings. The five trends documented are: 1. shifts in economic activity and growth between and within regions of the world; 2. increasing demand for goods and services among the very poor in emerging markets; 3. a faster pace and wider locus of technological innovation; 4. Increasingly global labor markets; and 5. increasingly ubiquitous and inexpensive access to information and knowledge.Each of these trends presents multinational firms with a potentially new avenue for growth, or an avenue down which they should consider moving further and/or faster. These potentially new avenues for growth are encouraging managers of multinational firms to challenge the current corporate strategies of their firms, and examine the need to reorient or renew them. The paper discusses the strategic challenges associated with these new avenues for growth, and the need for more research on the concept of country risk, on the concepts of the transnational strategy and organizational structure, and on the challenges of very limited sustainable capacity to consume among the very poor.