Ocimum Biosolutions From Bioinformatics To Integrated Custom Research Outsourcing Case Solution

1. Identify and describe two global issues that Ocimum faced as it began to globalize.

Ocimum initially established itself as an organization with expanded operations and functions globally with a well- functioning state of the art laboratory in the United States and a thoroughly developed research and data center at Hyderabad, India. It was that time when the company had to face the first major global challenge and that was the changing patent rights and laws in the country which meant that United States was obliged to shift its resources and technology from sequences into a completely different field and was the data generation and logistics, since getting the sequences patented was not a feasible option anymore given the expiration of the patents in the industry. Another challenge arose for the company when they were developing their first sequence analysis product ”Genchek” because the nature of the production required human resource to be expert in both IT and Biology and this domain specific skills set lacked heavily in India. Being a US based company they had to compromise in the initial stages and continue to take in applicants that were not fully suitable for the prescribed job which eventually meant heavy investments from the behalf of the company.

2. Identify and describe two multicultural issues that Ocimum faced as it began to globalize.

A company that is as diverse as Ocimum will definitely fall in the trap of multi-cultural issues. It became an organization that used strategic partnerships and mergers as the key strategy to expand and was thus faced with diversified operational issues. For example, India did not have a culture of IT technology and Biology combined thus it meant that the company had to train them so that they reach the employee standard that Ocimum had globally established. Another major challenge was that strategic alliances did allow the company to gain new technologies and feed on each company IT structure but most of the time these were not commercially viable. At a particular point in time information chip created by a German professor did not work at all and, therefore, the production had to be stopped given the increased competition from the local companies too.