The ORN conducts annual surveys tracking global sourcing strategies, drivers, concrete implementations and plans across all business functions and processes.
Dr. Arie Y. Lewin, Professor of Strategy and International Business and Director of Duke CIBER, was the initiator and has been the Lead Principal Investigator of the ORN project.
[5] While the ORN surveys confirm the importance of costs, they also reveal that companies use offshoring as a means to access talent pools outside their home countries, in particular for higher-skilled work.
[6] It is further reinforced by restrictive visa policies in the U.S. and incentives for foreign graduates to return to their home countries, a recent phenomenon referred to as brain circulation.
[9][10][11] However, foreign client firms sometimes respond to that challenge by setting up complex collaborations with local universities to secure access to qualified personnel.
According to ORN studies, the search for talent and cost considerations therefore depend on changes in technology, education policies, firm capabilities and economic conditions.
[21] One key proposition raised by the ORN research team is that offshoring is an intermediary step to evolving new global organizational capabilities rather than an end in itself.
[3] In general, organizational capabilities denote the ability of organizations – in this case firms – to deploy and use resources in a way that help them survive in a changing, competitive environment.