Financial crisis boosts outsourcing activities

A conference on outsourcing and offshoring is held on 15-16 October 2009

Outsourcing will be the main topic when leading practitioners and academics specialising in the area of outsourcing meet at the 2009 European Outsourcing Summit.

Research reaches international practitioners

- It is truly a pat on the back for CBS and the relevance of our research in the fields of offshoring and outsourcing that the world’s leading network for people working with this area chooses to have its annual meeting at CBS. It is recognised that we have something to offer, and even practitioners from outside our own borders have noticed it, Professor Torben Pedersen, Center for Strategic Management and Globalization, says.

From the corporate sector, leaders from Vodafone, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LEGO and Nordea participate, among others, and one of the topics at the conference will be the impact of the financial crisis on European outsourcing.

Forced to analyse needs

Torben Pedersen estimates that the crisis will accelerate outsourcing activities.

- The businesses are forced to scrutinise their activities and analyse whether they focus their resources on what they do best or if they may benefit from outsourcing some of their activities, he says.

Torben Pedersen emphasises that it will typically be projects, which in time would have been outsourced anyway, so increased outsourcing is not a quick fix to the crisis, but a more permanent solution. The crisis has made several businesses consider whether or not they may benefit from outsourcing some of the tasks closer to the core activities – in spite of the businesses’ usual reluctance to do exactly that.

At the conference, Torben Pedersen and Professor Arie Lewin from Duke University are going to compare Scandinavian businesses' use of outsourcing with that of the rest of Europe and the US.