Multinational Enterprises and Innovation: Regional Learning in Networks

by Heidenreich; Martin

• ISBN13: 9780415891158
• ISBN10: 0415891159
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The crucial actors of a global knowledge-based economy are multinational enterprises (MNEs). MNEs turn into essential protagonists of international innovation processes and organize their Research and Development (R&D) increasingly internationally. They provide important channels for the transfer of technological knowledge across national as well as cultural and institutional borders. Hence, MNEs are international networks for the inner-organizational transfer of technological competences. Complementary to transnational networks, the innovativeness of a company is based on regional and national innovation systems. The capability of a company to tap into regional contexts is a crucial prerequisite for its innovativeness.Multinational Enterprises and Innovation contributes to a better understanding of the interconnectedness between organizational and regional learning. These different forms of learning are especially important for corporate innovation projects confronted with technical, economic and institutional uncertainties. In this book, contributors investigate how MNEs cope with these uncertainties by drawing upon the complementary strengths of organizational and regional networks in national contexts. The book thus contributes to a better understanding of the organizational choices between spatially concentrated and internationally distributed forms of innovation as well as between internal and external constellations by analyzing the relationship between organizational, regional, national, and European arenas of knowledge production and knowledge transfer.