International opportunities developers

In a globalized world, opportunities in external markets can supplement the ones in the domestic market. Overall, those who seize those opportunities are large corporations of such scale and resources as to accessing them directly. There are export promotion agencies and some effective embassies and consulates that seek to help medium and small companies participate in the exporting effort. This action is critical for Southern Hemisphere countries but needs to be reinforced with complementary instruments that help materialize the opportunities identified over time.Developing competitiveness

To be part of that process it is indispensable to develop competitiveness. Not being tied to static competitive advantages but actively working to create new promising competitiveness spaces. This implies facing challenges in several fronts, including some that seem not to affect competitiveness when in fact they do, such as consolidating internal cohesion, improving public policies orientation and effectiveness, bringing down corruption and displacing criminal organizations.

If we also consider the fragility and small scale of most of our productive ventures, a feeling of discouragement emerges. For micro, small and a majority of medium producers it is hard to think about taking advantage of international opportunities when they often fail to seize opportunities in their own neighborhood. The thing is they not only lack the financial resources but also the access to knowledge, information, contacts, modern business engineering; they have limited management capacity and modest support in terms of productive and social infrastructure.

However, it is not an option to give up on facing contemporary challenges. We must work from our circumstances but exploring new ways to organize ourselves in order to solve scale, productivity, equity in the distribution of returns problems; also getting instruments that will enable connecting the identification of international opportunities with their seizing by small producers.

Orienting opportunities towards small production

Each opportunity demands to be worked upon both in the external as in the domestic front. On the one hand, it is essential to develop a proper productive capacity in the country to face the challenges of producing for other markets in terms of qualities, quantities, delivery times, presentation and prices. On the other, it is indispensable to know the selected external market, counting with appropriate trading channels, imposing a brand, guaranteeing payments and dealing with the necessity of investing in advertising and eventual follow-ups.

These and other requirements make of export a complex operation that in order to be faced properly demands having adequate knowledge, organization, management, contacts and funding. Therefore the small producers’ participation in export ends up being relatively small despite the valuable efforts implemented to establish export consortia and facilitate their presence in trading fairs and expositions.

In that context, instruments that can help materialize opportunities in favor of sectors at the base of the socioeconomic pyramid are missing. This means building teams capable of identifying opportunities in external markets and then, by themselves or through third parties, mobilizing in the countries inclusive ventures that seize them. These export promotion units that generate incomes and employment for families at the base of the socioeconomic pyramid are what we call international opportunities developers.

Inclusive ventures assisted by these developers are integrated by different types of economic actors that become partners providing each one their own contribution and, in that complementation, generate great aggregate value that would otherwise be minor or inexistent. Small producers constitute the venture’s productive base and they work with two kinds of strategic partners, different though complementary: on the one hand, those who provide managerial, commercial and technological knowledge and, on the other, those who from the Board ensure the course and add viability conditions to the venture through providing funding, contacts and access to markets as well as guaranteeing equity in the distribution of returns.

To sum up, the enormous universe of low income sectors does not usually take advantage of international opportunities. Identifying an external opportunity that can benefit small producers is part of a wide set of actions that is necessary to develop. Articulating inclusive ventures with the exporting effort is a strategic innovation to face the double challenge of taking advantage of the external opportunity while, at the same time, contributing to improve equity within our societies. Since this does not happen spontaneously, we need to have a proactive and specialized instrument that will complement the efforts of export promotion agencies. That is the field in which international opportunities developers can operate [[In forthcoming articles characteristics of these developers and examples of how to face external opportunities with inclusive ventures are presented.]] .

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