This will open up opportunities for employees to develop and build expertise," he wrote.
Some established foundations are moving to do that, and investment banks, consulting firms and university business schools are also moving to build expertise in advising clients on philanthropy.
At the time, rather than wait for M&A deals to return, he decided to build expertise in loan restructuring, to win business advising the many firms that were struggling with their debts.
Increasingly, all but the biggest firms are claiming to be specialists in particular sorts of deal.And even some big firms are claiming to specialise in several things: for example, Apax says it has built expertise in six carefully selected industries.
But shares of traditional asset managers like T. Rowe Price, which are less likely to risk billions of dollars to build expertise in an area riddled with acronyms (A.B.S., C.D.O., SIV), trade at more than 20 times earnings.
The use of parallel systems – which duplicate existing resources, are expensive and do not build expertise in developing countries – boils down to a lack of trust, especially as donors are under domestic pressure to show value for money in aid budgets.
To build expertise, product development employees specialize.
Another way to build expertise is to do personnel exchanges between facilities in China and in the west.
"With the vast amount of data available online, we are able to learn and build expertise that we would otherwise lack," Kulapala says.
"Through its joint venture affiliates Tenesol and Photovoltech, Total has built expertise along the photovoltaic solar power chain to make this technology more reliable, efficient and competitive.
Already one of the leading gas producers in the U.S. at the time, it is believed that European companies like BP are trying to build expertise as the number of shale opportunities increase worldwide.
