Vlerick Expertise in Strategy

Enedis, a subsidiary of EDF, is in charge of the last mile in the delivery of electricity to most of France. This case study follows the start and development of Enedis' digital transformation, with the ambition to be at the forefront of the energy sector in the digital age.

The BeLux market for outsourcing still has significant growth potential as companies continue to outsource more. The main drivers for outsourcing are a stronger focus on the core business and cost reduction, while business transformation has increased by 8% from 2016. Almost 83% of organisations that currently use automation, robotics and AI have experienced moderate/significant benefits of these technologies, and client satisfaction remains high with an average satisfaction score of 74% across all providers assessed.

Interpolis is a Dutch insurance company operating both in the life and the non-life market, as well as in the health industry. During the early 1990s, Interpolis faced serious financial problems and the company was in dire straits. The company has been turned around from 1994 onwards and the case study describes this transformation in greater detail. It shows how the top managers have built a strategy based on openness, transparency, clarity and trust: insurance has been made 'crystal clear.'

“Corporate social responsibility is not always a recipe for value creation. Sometimes corporate philanthropy or CSR initiatives make their recipients look bad. The question then is: what can they do to mitigate this negative effect?”, says professor Yuliya Shymko. She studied what corporate sponsoring and influence mean for non-profit recipients such as museums, theatres or universities, and to what extent we should allow this influence to be exercised.

All else being equal, if you could choose between sourcing services in a country that has a culture similar to your own or one with a different culture – which one would you choose? “Our observation is that, when confronted with that choice, most managers opt for the ‘cultural proximity’ option. But data show that you may want to think twice before you embark on the ‘easier’ road,” says Carine Peeters, professor of strategy at Vlerick Business School.

Belgian chocolates are world famous. Together with Switzerland, Belgium is internationally known as the country of chocolates. Belgian chocolatiers win many international awards. Belgium is also the largest chocolate exporter in the world, exporting over 1 billion € of the sweet stuff every year. Based on very detailed export data in the period 1998-2010, researchers Filip Abraham, Zuzanna Studnicka and Jan Van Hove unravel the DNA of Belgian chocolate exporting firms and identify the factors that drive their export strategies.

The BeLux market for outsourcing still has significant growth potential as companies continue to outsource more. The main drivers for outsourcing are a stronger focus on the core business and cost reduction. The majority of contracts surveyed are meeting their objectives, and client satisfaction is high with an average satisfaction score of 75% across all providers assessed. These are the key conclusions of the 2015 IT Outsourcing Study for Belgium and Luxembourg.

Some organisations can implement a management innovation1 relatively quickly and smoothly – but other organisations, implementing the same innovation, experience much more difficulty. Why is that? And how might we make the process quicker and easier?

Strategy implementation - or strategy execution - is a hot topic today. Managers spend significant resources on consulting and training, in the hope of creating brilliant strategies, but all too often these strategies do not translate into brilliant performance. This book by Vlerick professor Kurt Verweire presents new conceptual models and tools that can be used to implement different strategies.

Studio 100 is a nice example of a product leader. Product leaders are companies that win in their market by having high-quality and the most innovative products in the industry. This case illustrates well what product leadership means in practice.