Research on CORE's Development Strategy
Abstract

Non-profit organizations are different from for-profit ones on that their performance is not evaluated by those measures such as profit, sales growth, market share and etc. As one of such organizations in today's China that sees the dynamic growth of NPOs, China Open Resources for Education (hereinafter CORE) is devoted to promoting closer interaction and open sharing of educational resources between Chinese and international universities with an ultimate goal of achieving education enhancement. For over five years, CORE has been committing to its task as well as competing with Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (hereinafter OOPS), an organization rooted in Taiwan undertaking the same task.

The author found that in some aspects, it was not difficult to perceive CORE's inferior position to OOPS as far as operation efficiency and public support are concerned. Profit, as previously mentioned, may not be one of the measures for NPO's output, and such organizations do not have the so-called profit-and-loss statement, it is, however, the competitive performance that can justify their existence, i.e. NPOs should utilize limited resources to maximize their social benefits and achieve the expected goals. Undoubtedly speaking, this is where effective management should be valued. Based on this agreement, NPOs and enterprises alike should prioritize in the first place their competitive strategy.

The article first introduces NPOs' macro environment in the mainland of China and what CORE has been doing during 2004 and 2007, then employs some commonly used models including that of SWOT, 5 forces and value-chain to compare CORE and OOPS. Finally the article simply reviews the problems faced by CORE and gives some proposals based on personal experiences and some related theories.

What the article left un-touched are the following issues. First, NPOs in the mainland of today's China are not fully developed yet, which means successful experience from outside may not certainly applies to domestic situations. Second, the mentioned MITOCW localization project has been undertaken by only two organizations in Chinese-spoken areas, respectively CORE in Beijing and OOPS in Taiwan. The author kept in touch with them as early as in 2004 but the data or information obtained is so limited from CORE as to be seriously introspected before being properly referred to by other NPOs widely. Third, for reasons of restrictions in practices, the written proposals and suggestions have not been verified or tested in practice.

Key Words
strategy, value chain, 5 forces, volunteer management, MITOCW

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This post has been edited by aRNoLD on Apr 19 2009, 07:23 PM