Published papers

Purpose: This paper explores how the organizational resilience of multinational corporations (MNCs) can be attained through mitigating the liability of foreignness (LOF) faced by their subsidiaries so that they can navigate challenges more effectively. By bridging the gap between MNC resilience and the liability and advantage of foreignness of their subsidiaries, this study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of how MNCs can thrive in volatile and uncertain international markets. Design/methodology/approach: By drawing on the extant literature on resilience and liability/advantage of foreignness, this paper presents a novel perspective on the way resilience of subsidiaries contributes to the resilience of the MNCs as a whole. Findings: Subsidiaries contribute substantially to the resilience of MNCs by creating a network of adaptive responses in their host locations and beyond and by playing crucial roles in challenging uncertain and turbulent environments. Accordingly, the resilience of foreign subsidiaries depends on their organizational capability and certain structural arrangements that enable them to turn LOF into advantage. This intricate interplay emphasizes the importance of subsidiary-level resilience in shaping the resilience of the entire MNC. Originality/value: This paper emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the resilience of the whole MNC while stressing the important role played by the subsidiaries to turn the LOF into the advantage.

Outbound open innovation, the external commercialization of the firm's knowledge, is important for creating and sustaining its competitive advantage. Surprisingly, limited studies have explained how and why a firm can enhance its likelihood of engagement in outbound open innovation activities by collaborating with universities, especially foreign ones. Building on the knowledge-based view (KBV), first, we differentiate the effects of collaborating with foreign versus domestic universities, since these create scientific knowledge that varies in novelty and ease of transfer. Second, based on these two knowledge dimensions, we argue that foreign university collaboration is more likely to have a higher positive association with outbound open innovation than domestic university collaboration, because the former has higher knowledge novelty than the latter. Third, however, when firms also collaborate with domestic value chain partners, collaborating with domestic universities is likely to have a higher positive association. We tested these arguments on 541 firms in New Zealand and found that collaborating with foreign universities has a positive association, especially when the universities are located in developed economies. Collaborating with domestic universities has a positive association when firms also collaborate with their domestic value chain partners.

Global competition means that firms are under pressure to systematically develop the efficiency of their manufacturing processes. However, little has been said in the international business literature about how firms, especially those subject to severe barriers, can search for knowledge within and across national boundaries to help in the development of process innovation. We build on key aspects of the innovation and search strategy literature to develop our conceptual model and hypotheses, which we test in the context of a less-developed, isolated, and closed economy, using data from 171 automotive component suppliers in Iran. We find that foreign knowledge search is positively related to process innovation, even in an economy that operates under severe economic sanctions. This contributes to the international business field by providing evidence that, while economic sanctions are increasingly used in modern geopolitics by the world's most powerful countries, these actions may fail to achieve their goals with respect to individual businesses.

© 2017 Academy of International Business. We investigate determinants of global knowledge sourcing of overseas R&D subsidiaries, shedding light on vertical cross-border embeddedness within firms. Drawing on the paradox of embeddedness perspective, which assumes that embeddedness may facilitate or hinder knowledge transfer, we examine the extent to which different types of internal vertical embeddedness - administrative versus knowledge - facilitate global knowledge sourcing. We find that vertical administrative embeddedness inhibits global knowledge sourcing, while vertical knowledge embeddedness promotes it. We also find differing moderating effects of geographic distance between headquarters and its subsidiaries on the association between vertical embeddedness and global knowledge sourcing.

© 2019 We analyze frugality-based advantage and explain its types and implications. Frugality-based advantage is an advantage that a firm achieves over competitors in its ability to develop and use frugal innovations, that is, innovations that overcome external resource constraints. We differentiate among three types of frugality-based advantages based on the external constraints they solve: (1) Input frugality-based advantage, which is the result of addressing restrictions in the provision of inputs needed for the production process; (2) Income frugality-based advantage, which is driven by solving limitations in the income of consumers; and (3) Infrastructure frugality-based advantage, which is the outcome of resolving constraints in the hard and soft infrastructure of the country. We explain how these three types of frugality-based advantages differ in their transferability across locations and their sustainability across time. Frugality-based advantage complements the resource-based view by explaining how the scarcity of external resources, rather than their abundance, can support the advantage of some firms.

© 2020, The Author(s). This study explores the relations between the different parts of headquarters (HQ) to which subsidiaries report and the knowledge-sharing patterns of subsidiaries in multinational corporations (MNCs). Despite the growing interest in the disaggregation of HQ, little is known about how subsidiaries’ reporting relationships with different parts of HQ are associated with the knowledge-sharing patterns of subsidiaries. Based on this motivation, we disaggregated HQ into different parts, i.e., corporate R&D HQ, top management, divisional HQ, and regional HQ, and explored how knowledge-sharing patterns of overseas R&D subsidiaries vary according to the different parts of the HQ to which they report. We found that subsidiaries reporting to corporate R&D HQ show the highest level of external knowledge sharing (EKS), while those reporting to divisional HQ show the lowest level; in addition, subsidiaries reporting to top management show the highest level of internal knowledge sharing (IKS), while those reporting to regional HQ show the lowest level. The study implies that the knowledge-sharing patterns of overseas R&D subsidiaries in MNCs cannot be fully understood without examining the subsidiaries’ reporting relationships with differing parts of the HQ.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019. Abstract This chapter analyzes Japan’s changing competitive position in the TFT-LCD industry over the past several decades. Based on the analysis of multiple factors that affected Japan’s decline, I identified paradigm shifts in the TFT-LCD industry that have directly or indirectly led to a change in Japan’s competitive position. The chapter shows that declining competitiveness of a country and a firm cannot be fully understood without closely relating it to the shifts in the paradigm of the industry. In addition, this chapter shows how the paradigm shifts of the industry, the changing competitive positions of a country and a firm, as well as the changing locus of innovation for a company, i.e. domestic vs. international and in-house versus collaborative, are aligned with one another.