Amy Karam – Competitive Advantage and Innovation Strategist (CANADA)

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Economics & Finance

Amy Karam is a trusted authority on globalization, innovation, competitive strategy, the shifting power dynamics in international business, and the geo-political impact of China’s rise as well as other emerging nations.

With a dynamic, engaging and unique presentation style, she combines humor, wit and hard truths to create an effective and lasting impression on the audience.

She has engaged thousands of leaders and sales professionals worldwide.

Business, politics and innovation are intertwined as never before.

As a speaker, author, commentator and educator, Amy Karam equips companies and governments with insights and strategies to successfully navigate challenging global trade dynamics and a new kind of competition from China and other emerging nations.

Amy Karam is the author of The China Factor: Leveraging Emerging Business Strategies to Compete, Grow and Win in the New Global Economy (Wiley) and a Global Expansion and Competitive Strategy consultant.

She equips organizations with strategies and tactics to navigate the new global geopolitical-business dynamics and is a professional instructor for Stanford and Duke University, as well as conducting her own workshops, as founder of the Global Business Innovation Academy.

Karam is a keynote speaker on global trade and innovation; she shares her 15 years of Silicon Valley experience and extensive international expertise having worked with 50+ countries on all continents.

She was also the lead of a CEO-sponsored global competitive sales support program at Cisco Systems where she defended and won up to $1 billion in revenues per year in deals competing with Huawei.

As a fellow for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, she shares with thought leadership with a perspective on how public policy and private sector can collaborate to enable global competitiveness.

Our Evolution to Digital Transformation

While there are exponential leaps in 5G connectivity, quick accommodation of virtual work and availability of remote services online, we’re not at the point of full adoption yet.

Many virtual organizations weren’t really technologically ready from a security perspective for example.

And many banks still don’t provide banking statements electronically longer than 3 months ago. What’s happening? Technology creation evolves faster than technology adoption.

The push for digital transformation should really be considered digital evolution.As an active member of the tech community, Amy Karam shares how you can make small, ongoing incremental changes to evolve on your way to digital transformation.

The new work paradigm has opened eyes of employees and employers to new options and infrastructure requirements.

Customers are also now aware of different ways to be serviced remotely – is your institution ready to do that?

Gain a competitive edge by digitizing your customer fulfillment strategy – won’t take much to get ahead of others as you continue to evolve.

Global Trends are Shifting the World Order

Geopolitics are not just for politicians – business needs to incorporate this into their plans, risk diversification and more.

Our global stock markets are intertwined.Expert in emerging markets, Amy Karam shares that the G7 democracies no longer rule, it’s the G20.

Emerging markets players now have a much bigger influence on global trade, including China, Russia, India.

They have large populations, climbing the economic development ladder, they are more motivated and assertive.

Supply chains and value chains are concentrated in too few countries which lends to economic and security risks.

Covid 19 pandemic made the supply chain gaps (and other risks) much more obvious to the West.

These global trends affect your domestic order.

Amy Karam discusses

• How it affects you directly at home.
• Competitiveness in trade – IP theft; lower cost alternatives to your goods/innovation etc
• Supply chain of critical goods
• Manufacturing dependency overseas, vs domestically, results in delay in satisfying demand, higher prices, and a shift in income distribution sources.
• Cybersecurity threats

Is the Innovation Advantage slipping in the West?

Amy Karam notes that while we’re often lauded for our innovation, she challenges whether we are truly actioning our ideas and monetizing them for future growth and prosperity:

The West has been resting on its laurels and its ‘innovation advantage’ status from past decades.
Being the best is static – becoming better (like emerging competitors are) is growth
West has been naïve about collaboration with and knowledge transfer to emerging countries like China and others – now they are surpassing us in some areas.

What was really behind the lobbying of other countries to ban Huawei, other than national security concerns?

We need to shift mindset from innovation R&D to innovation commercialization – intellectual to monetization mindset. Is Canada just too comfortable? Are we looking at true Business Model Innovation?

The China Factor

Drawing on content from her best-selling book, The China Factor, Karam equips Western audience with a practical framework for competing successfully in today’s ever–changing global markets.

Based on customers in over 50 countries, and Karam’s experience competing with Huawei when she led a competitive intelligence and sales support program at Cisco, you will learn why a premium product, may not be the key to winning business in foreign markets, and you’ll discover the new critical factors that contribute to success in both established and emerging markets.

Disruptive competitors are transformed from threats to examples as you learn to recognize opportunities for re–evaluation, and shift your strategy to stay ahead of the curve.

Key Takeaways

• How to become innovative in how you do business globally
• How your business can become innovative at innovation.