In 1991, in the midst of the program to create a liberal Single European Market and in the context of a new Joint Declaration for cooperation with Japan, the European Commission brokered a private deal to restrict Japanese imports into the European Community for nearly a decade (1993–1999). These “Elements of Consensus” developed from the collective efforts of European automakers and their business interest associations—the CCMC and ACEA—to shape the Community’s Common Commercial Policy and insulate themselves from the threat of Japanese competition (1985–1991). Drawing evidence from archival documents, this article reconstructs how European automakers lobbied the Commission for protections and how the Commission tried to use these protections as a means for regional market liberalization. As a result, it contributes new dimensions to scholarship on the influence of corporations in politics in general and the relationship between business and European integration in particular.
In January 2020, Ashwani Gupta took over as COO at Nissan Motor Corporation, and several weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Nissan’s Business Continuity Plan (BCP) had been key to the resilience of Nissan’s supply chain. It had enabled Nissan to recover from past supply chain disruptions, mainly natural disasters, sooner than its competitors. This case describes the BCP, within the context of Nissan’s production methods, organizational principles and current financial position. It relates how Gupta managed the rapidly-evolving restrictions that the coronavirus pandemic required as it spread from China to other countries where Nissan’s assembly plants and suppliers were located. Based on his experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, Gupta considers how to improve the BCP. This case also covers a specific situation in India, where Nissan had to quickly find an alternate supplier for a unit of dashboard gauges. The team in India developed four options that can be evaluated by students.
In 2016, Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani, aeronautical engineers at All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., began to wonder why, in a world of accelerating globalization and digital connectivity, those who lived in far-remote villages or impoverished urban areas could not access high quality education or healthcare. They believed that with a faster, cheaper mode of transportation, they could democratize the world’s resources—bring the right people or resources together to the right places at the right time. Although teleportation was still the “stuff of science-fiction,” teleporting human consciousness and skills to remote locations through robots was not. Their vision was to build an “avatar service platform”—a global infrastructure of general-purpose avatar robots that humans could rent, like Uber or AirBnB, to perform surgery, defuse a bomb, visit elderly grandparents, attend school, or vacation in distant physical environments. In Akira and Kevin’s eyes, ANA was in the mobility business, not just the airline business. They influenced senior management to invest $22 million to fund the ANA AVATAR XPRIZE and, with ANA’s support, built a global avatar ecosystem of technologists, start-ups, corporations, non-profits, and government, including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. As they worked to advance the technology and regulatory landscape, they also generated demand for avatar services—for that, they needed to change the mindset of the general public. By 2020, the “ANA AVATAR” program, as they called it, had made significant progress, and Akira and Kevin initiated the process to spin out of ANA, and launch a start-up, “avatarin.” Then, COVID-19 upended reality. The years they thought it would take to create widespread demand for avatar-enabled telepresence had evaporated. Now, the question was, how should they deploy their start-up team to meet the humanitarian need, investor, and partner expectations? How should they respond to the demands of this unprecedented moment in human history?
See more research