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The president’s speech reflected an ambivalence. At times, he framed the country’s economic challenge as a Cold War-style, zero-sum game: “the competition for jobs is real,” “we need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world,” innovation must “produce jobs in America and not overseas.”...   >>>

The president’s speech reflected an ambivalence. At times, he framed the country’s economic challenge as a Cold War-style, zero-sum game: “the competition for jobs is real,” “we need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world,” innovation must “produce jobs in America and not overseas.”



But another part of the address was about enmeshing the United States more deeply in the global economy and making it even more dependent on the prosperity of its sometime rivals. The president talked up trade — boasting about agreements with India and China, claiming credit for his hard-won free trade deal with South Korea, promising to pursue similar pacts with Panama and Colombia and even giving a boost to the neglected global trade negotiations.



Businesspeople (and teenagers) are used to this sort of complicated relationship with counterparts that are sometimes rivals and sometimes partners — they call them frenemies, as Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, the marketing and communications company, famously described Google.



Nowadays, countries live in a world of frenemies, too, as the discussion of reverse innovation, one of the hot topics at Davos this week, underscored. T.K. Kurian, chief executive of Wipro IT, the pioneering Indian outsourcing company, said in an interview that to succeed in the fast-growing emerging markets, Western companies needed to move some of their research and development there.



That, he said, was the only way they could truly “understand what a frugal environment means.”



**The excerpts above are taken from the NYT article, "Leaders See New Global Business Reality in Davos " written by Chrystia Freeland linked below. Do click through and read more of the business reality as reflected by Davos.**