The worst crisis in half a century has changed the rules of the game for companies with international ambitions, according to a recently published white paper from by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm and a leading advisor on business strategy.

Western companies must become more like the brash upstarts from the rapidly developing economies (RDEs) such as China and India if they are to succeed in the new global business environment.

“It is no longer enough to take the home-country business model into RDE markets and to target customers in premium segments and the main cities,” says Bernd Waltermann, senior partner, BCG. “The biggest growth opportunities in the developing countries lie in the midmarket and below, where consumers have very different needs that the new global challengers from the RDEs are adept at meeting.”

The paper, titled Competing for Advantage: How to Succeed in the New Global Reality, sets out an analytical framework to help companies achieve competitive advantage in markets around the world. Four factors — market access, resource access, local adaptation, and network coordination — are essential to developing successful globalization strategies, creating business models that can adapt to local demands, and integrating those models into the global network to share best practices and achieve synergies.

BCG calls this framework the Global Advantage Diamond, which can be used by companies to map their optimal global footprint and devise a strategy to achieve it.

Most Western companies will have planned their globalization strategies in incremental steps — expanding into new markets, for example or offshoring production. The most successful global companies now adopt a philosophy of “manyness” — many products and services, drawing on many skills, talents, ideas, organizations, and systems to compete in many market segments.

However, they do not lose sight of the benefits of their global networks, and draw talent and products from their RDE operations back to their markets in the developed economies. Some of the world's leading global companies now embody manyness in their organization, in some cases moving the headquarters of operating divisions to RDEs.

To learn more about the manyness philosophy, visit www.bcg.com.