Guoli Chen
Professor of Strategy
INSEAD
Guoli Chen is a Professor of Strategy at INSEAD. He teaches Strategy, Value Innovation, Incentives Design, and Corporate Governance courses to the MBA, PhD, and Executive Education programme participants.
Guoli's research focuses on the influence of CEOs, top executives, and boards of directors on firms' strategic choices and organisational outcomes, as well as the interaction and dynamics in the top management team and CEO-board relationships. He is interested in organisational growth, renewal, and corporate development activities, such as IPOs, M&As, innovation, globalisation.
He has published in several top academic journals, such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Business Venturing, Leadership Quarterly, and Strategic Organization. His papers have received awards at the Academy of Management Conference and Strategic Management Society Conference. He was a representative-at-large of the Corporate Strategy and Corporate Governance interest group of the Strategic Management Society and serves on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Journal.
Before starting his academic career, Guoli worked as an investment banker at Daiwa Securities SMBC. He provided financial consulting in the areas of IPOs, fundraising, and company restructuring.
Guoli’s top bestselling cases
Browse Guoli’s top three bestselling cases during the last year.In May 2021, SHEIN overtook Amazon as the most downloaded shopping app on the US iOS and Android app stores. During the 2020 pandemic, SHEIN achieved substantial sales growth and is now catching up with the fast-fashion giant Zara. This case first briefly discusses the apparel and fast-fashion industry and the creation of the fast-fashion model by Zara. Then it covers SHEIN's historical development and its 'fast-fashion 2.0' business model-using big data and algorithms to identify customers and their preferences. The case also discusses various perspectives of SHEIN's business operations: products and pricing, marketing and branding, and supply chain management.
The global mobile phone market is becoming saturated, especially in developed economies where phone makers are competing for market share in an increasingly 'red ocean'. In contrast, the African market for mobile phones has huge growth potential given a fast-expanding population and high proportion of young people, yet relatively low rate of mobile phone penetration. Transsion, a Shenzhen-based mobile phone manufacturer (that few Chinese have heard of), spotted a blue ocean opportunity and within a few years had become the 'mobile phone king of Africa'. The case describes its growth trajectory, competitors, challenges and future opportunities.
As a result of fast-developing mobile technology, companies must deal with increasing business complexity in a high-velocity environment. The Uber vs Didi case illustrates a wide range of strategic issues that a company may face when creating a new business model, generating unprecedented value for customers, challenging traditional business and regulatory frameworks, and expanding into an emerging market to compete with local rivals.