Learning across the Border? Innovations, Knowledge Sharing, and Business Opportunities in MNCs

Much has been written on the importance, benefits and pitfalls of inter-organisational learning and knowledge management (KM) among networked organisations that aim to enhance their competitive advantage through complementary inter-organisational relationships and activities. These networked organisations typically include suppliers, clients and competitors who are related to each other through their involvement, often at different stages, in a certain product, service, or business process. By comparison, little attention has been given to issues related to knowledge transfer and intra/inter-organisational learning among multinational corporations (MNCs) as a specific networked organisational form. This is despite the fact that MNCs, be they in the manufacturing or service sectors, make up an increasingly large proportion of business forms in today’s globalising economy. There is insufficient understanding on, for example, what MNCs do to plug into local centres of technological competence; what strategies and processes they use to co-ordinate and manage their dispersed subsidiaries across both national and organisational borders for the globalisation of locally held knowledge; and the extent to which establishment managers display corporate entrepreneurship by exploiting innovations taken place elsewhere in the MNC and turn them into business opportunities for their own establishment.