The Emergence and Impact of MNC Centres of Excellence explores an important new element in the development of the multinational corporation. Whilst previously the parent company was seen as the centre, and the foreign subsidiaries as the periphery, today, it is recognized that different subsidiaries have different roles, and are linked to each other in a complicated pattern. One crucial aspect of this is that some subsidiaries become 'centres of excellence' (COE) controlling resources on which other parts of the corporation depend for their operations. This book investigates the existence of COEs in different countries, examining why they emerge and analysing their impact on corporate strategy.

The continuous search for efficiency gains and the goal of attaining a sustainable competitive advantage have steadily increased the volume of goods and services procured globally from third party vendors. In this context, named as "the next wave of globalization", the offshoring phenomenon has stimulated research and political debates. With the rise of services offshoring, international value chain disaggregation for services has reached a formerly unknown scale. Also, it is increasingly complex transactions, requiring a higher degree of qualification, which are becoming subject to offshoring as well. The Offshoring Challenge: Strategic Design and Innovation for Tomorrow's Organization features selected chapters by an international research community on the topic of offshoring. All potential business models from offshore outsourcing to third party providers are covered, from cooperative arrangements to internal organizational set-ups including captive offshore centers. Contributions have significant insights regarding: the increasing offshoring of knowledge-intensive services; the offshoring process; business models incorporating offshoring; the hidden costs of offshoring; and the administration of offshoring activities within firms The book is aimed at a broad audience of scholars, students and practitioners in the fields of strategy, international business and operations management.

The role that small- and medium-sized enterprises play in the economic development and growth of cities, regions and nations has been an increasing subject of debate and study for the last half century. This volume focuses on the opportunities and challenges that entrepreneurs and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face in a world of global competition. The papers therein provide an overview of successful strategies that global entrepreneurs and SMEs have employed that have allowed them to establish regional and international footprint and of how local resources, culture and managerial capabilities have contributed to startups' global success. In doing so it highlights original, edgy ideas and theoretical advances that will provide the foundation for future doctoral dissertations and other research projects on international entrepreneurship.

Volume 28 of the Advances in International Management focuses on the opportunities and challenges for multinational enterprises that consider emerging economies as their destinations or their homes. Chapters in this volume examine the rise of home-grown multinational enterprises in emerging economies and the challenges they face when they enter developed markets. They also analyze the co-evolution of and the dynamic interaction between market institutions and business organizations in emerging economies. The volume provides a forum for thought-provoking ideas, empirical research, and discussions, and is ideal for researchers and doctoral students whose work touches emerging markets.

This authoritative collection, edited by a leading academic in the field of international and global strategy, brings together seminal papers published in the past 30 years. Areas covered in this important volume include the emergence of a global village, the advantages of a global strategy and the challenges of implementing it. This book, along with an original introduction by Professor Pedersen, will be of immense value to researchers, students and practitioners interested in international and global strategy.

Today, innovation does not just occur in large and incumbent R&D organizations. Instead, it often emerges from the start-up community. In the new innovation economy, the key is to quickly find pieces of innovation, some of which may already be developed. Therefore, there is the need for more advanced means of searching and identifying innovation wherever it may occurs. We point to the importance of data-driven innovation based on digital platforms, as their footprints are growing rapidly and in sync with the shift from analogue to digital innovation workflows. This book offers companies insights on paths to business success and tools that will help them find the right route through the various options when it comes to the digital platforms where innovations may be discovered and from which value may be appropriated. The world hungers for growth and one of the most important vehicles for growth is innovation. In light of the new digital platforms from which data-driven innovation can be extracted, major parts of analogue workflows will be substituted with digital workflows. Data-driven innovation and digital innovation workflows are here to stay. Are you?

With intensified global competition, institutional changes and reduced communication costs the propensity of firms to reconfigure their global value chain and separate their activities across national boundaries has increased markedly. It enables firms to combine the benefits arising from specialization and increased flexibility with location advantages. Consequently, large parts of manufacturing and other more standardized activities have been offshored to emerging countries. However, recent developments are challenging this traditional separation between advanced and emerging economies as host of knowledge- and production-intensive activities, respectively. Recent research has emphasized the role of intra-organizational relationships and links among the different parts of the value chain. Innovative and productive activities are affected by strong interdependencies and complementarities, and for some companies the co-location of R&D and manufacturing is critical for development and innovation. This volume will interest scholars in International Business, Economic Geography, Operations and Supply Chain Management, International Economics, and Political Science.

The organizational design of the Multinational Corporation (MNC) was a vibrant area of research in the field of International Business and Management during the 1970-1990's. However, since then this research has largely faded from our scholarship. This volume of AIM is designed to spark new life into the research on the organizational design of the MNC. The world - and environmental forces - has changed substantially in the last decades placing new constrains on the MNCs. External shocks have increased and MNCs need to learn how to live with this increased market volatility. Integrating value chains makes MNCs more efficient but also vulnerable. The relentless forces of competition and globalization are forcing MNCs to divide their activities and reach for foreign inputs, markets and partners. By dividing their value chain into discrete pieces -- - some to be performed in-house, while others are outsourced to partner organizations -- - MNCs hope to reduce overall costs and risks, while also reaping the benefits of ideas from contractors or alliance partners worldwide. These challenges call for new research on the organizational design of the MNC. It is our intention with this AIM volume to motivate new research on the proper organizational design mechanisms of MNCs as of today.

This volume advances the debate on the past, present and future of international business and management research. A truly international group of experts present their perspectives, and ask the question 'What is it that we know?' when discussing major issues and concepts in the field. This annual collection includes a regular special feature on a leading scholar; exploring in this volume the work of Jean-Francois Hennart and his theories on multinational enterprise and strategic management. Part two addresses international business and international management issues from a philosophical perspective, examining key topics such as post-merger integration, dominant design theory, internalizing firms and the strategy-performance relationship.

This volume concentrates on the substantive gaps in the IB/IM field and addresses whether these gaps are resolvable with our current theoretical and methodological toolkit. This entails three specific queries about the past and present: Have our theories advanced some combination of explanation and prediction? Have our methods proven to be effective in providing rigorous, robust and consistent evidence with respect to the explanatory and predictive validity of our theories? Have we studied the right phenomena in the right way?

Institutional theory has been used increasingly by international business and management researchers to explain the behavior and strategies of multinational enterprises. If early international business research was dominated by the application of transaction cost and neoclassical economics, reviews of recent publications and conference programs suggest that the past decade has been dominated by the application of institutional theory. The 2012 volume of the "Advances in International Management" series represents the collection of an eclectic mix of contemporary research by leading and emerging scholars working on institutional theory. The contributions present new theoretical frameworks of institutions and propose interesting ideas that will provide the foundation for doctoral dissertations and research projects.

Cross-border flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and ideas have substantially increased over the last decades. These developments have increased the interdependencies among previously separated economies, given rise to arguments regarding the flattening of the world. Yet, firms investing overseas continue to experience substantial liabilities stemming from their foreignness. At the same time new locations are appearing on the global map that offers very attractive location-specific advantages. In addition, the range of participants in international competition has widened, in terms of both the number of countries involved and the types of firms competing, to encompass developed market firms expanding beyond industrialized countries, and emerging market firms joining global competition. The focus of this volume is on how the interface between firm-specific advantages, liability of foreignness, and location-specific advantages are spelled out in the more global world.

The continuous search for efficiency gains and the goal of attaining a sustainable competitive advantage have steadily increased the volume of goods and services procured globally from third party vendors. In this context, named as "the next wave of globalization", the offshoring phenomenon has stimulated research and political debates. With the rise of services offshoring, international value chain disaggregation for services has reached a formerly unknown scale. Also, it is increasingly complex transactions, requiring a higher degree of qualification, which are becoming subject to offshoring as well. The Offshoring Challenge: Strategic Design and Innovation for Tomorrow's Organization features selected chapters by an international research community on the topic of offshoring. All potential business models from offshore outsourcing to third party providers are covered, from cooperative arrangements to internal organizational set-ups including captive offshore centers. Contributions have significant insights regarding: the increasing offshoring of knowledge-intensive services; the offshoring process; business models incorporating offshoring; the hidden costs of offshoring; and the administration of offshoring activities within firms The book is aimed at a broad audience of scholars, students and practitioners in the fields of strategy, international business and operations management.

Companies are increasingly asking which of their value chain activities are best performed within their own company and which may be outsourced. In addition, they are also considering which pieces of their value chain may be better performed abroad. These interrelated decisions concerning outsourcing and offshoring have not only changed entire industries, they have also transformed the lives of people across the world. Hundreds of millions of jobs in emerging nations have been the direct result of outsourcing and offshoring decisions. At the same time, many people in the developed world have lost their jobs because a company has been able to find a cheaper alternative. Featuring contributions from scholars in eleven different countries, this book was the first to examine the theory and practice of outsourcing and offshoring simultaneously. It includes studies of a variety of different industries, including pharmaceuticals, automobiles, medical records, appliances, human resource management and telecommunications.

The search for competitive advantage serves as the basis for organizational strategy. This book argues that there are four key sources of competitive advantage and financial success that have not been given the attention they deserve. Firstly, that organizational design and management processes may be strategic resources in their own right. Secondly, that organizational design and management processes can be deployed to create new strategic resources. Thirdly, that managers have begun to think of organizational design and management processes in a proactive way rather than seeing them more passively as necessary facilitators of success. Fourthly, that this new way of looking at organization and management requires a search for new ways of structuring organizational design and managerial processes. These points are driven home through case studies of the Danish firms LEGO Group, Vestas Wind Systems, Coloplast, Chr. Hansen, IC Companys and NKT Flexibles.

"The design of an effective global value chain is a major challenge to company managers of today. Just think of the managerial difficulties in configuring the value chain so that shifting comparative advantages of developed and developing countries are utilized optimally - and at the same time making these geographically dispersed value chain activities work together in concerted action. The book gives a good snapshot of where Danish companies are in this global value chain process."""

Companies are increasingly asking which of their value chain activities are best performed within their own company and which may be outsourced. In addition, they are also considering which pieces of their value chain may be better performed abroad. These interrelated decisions concerning outsourcing and offshoring have not only changed entire industries, they have also transformed the lives of people across the world. Hundreds of millions of jobs in emerging nations have been the direct result of outsourcing and offshoring decisions. At the same time, many people in the developed world have lost their jobs because a company has been able to find a cheaper alternative. Featuring contributions from scholars in eleven different countries, this book was the first to examine the theory and practice of outsourcing and offshoring simultaneously. It includes studies of a variety of different industries, including pharmaceuticals, automobiles, medical records, appliances, human resource management and telecommunications.

This volume concentrates on the substantive gaps in the IB/IM field and addresses whether these gaps are resolvable with our current theoretical and methodological toolkit. This entails three specific queries about the past and present: Have our theories advanced some combination of explanation and prediction? Have our methods proven to be effective in providing rigorous, robust and consistent evidence with respect to the explanatory and predictive validity of our theories? Have we studied the right phenomena in the right way?

The objective of this special issue is to contribute to the understanding of Knowledge Governance in the Mulitnational Corporation. Like the traditional literature on corporate governance the authors are concerned with the attraction of crucial capital, its efficient allocation, as well as the mechanism used to achieve capital accumulation and optimal utilization. Knowledge as a particular sort of capital is seen as increasingly crucial to the existence, boundaries, and economic organization of modern Multinational Corporation.

This book presents seven case studies of large Danish investment companies in India and China. The case studies provide intriguing perspectives on the strategic and managerial challenges and opportunities facing Western multinational corporations operating in these two Asian giants. The case studies encourage readers to adopt a decision maker's perspective, targeting students and managers interested in multinational corporation strategy in emerging markets.

"This book addresses the challenges associated with managing global offshoring strategies. Offshoring and offshore outsourcing are hardly new phenomena. What is new is that information technology creates new opportunities for geographically dispersed business activities and enables the fragmentation of the value chain for ""traditional"" production and service companies. The pace of offshoring is likely to gain further momentum. The authors' intention in this book is to ""put a face"" on some Danish companies as they contemplate and engage in offshoring projects. When selecting the cases, the authors chose a diverse set that exemplifies the complicated range of challenges that companies face when they migrate products or services. All of the cases were developed on the basis of in-depth field research and close collaboration with the respective company managers. The book targets bachelor, master and MBA students taking courses on global strategy. It can be used in conjunction with a set of readings and articles on global strategy issues. Although the book is meant to serve as teaching material, the authors hope that business professionals also find inspiration and interesting insights applicable to their own organizations as they search for global offshoring opportunities."

The search for competitive advantage serves as the basis for organizational strategy. This book argues that there are four key sources of competitive advantage and financial success that have not been given the attention they deserve. Firstly, that organizational design and management processes may be strategic resources in their own right. Secondly, that organizational design and management processes can be deployed to create new strategic resources. Thirdly, that managers have begun to think of organizational design and management processes in a proactive way rather than seeing them more passively as necessary facilitators of success. Fourthly, that this new way of looking at organization and management requires a search for new ways of structuring organizational design and managerial processes. These points are driven home through case studies of the Danish firms LEGO Group, Vestas Wind Systems, Coloplast, Chr. Hansen, IC Companys and NKT Flexibles.