Innovation And Institutional Embeddedness Of Multinational Companies

‘This wonderful volume brings together contributions mainly from the innovation literature, whose findings are in a sense quite familiar, but which in this collection are juxtaposed in such a way as to highlight their common institutional underpinnings. This is very much due to the efforts of the editor, whose insightful introduction and editorial vision brings out several interesting and emerging themes from this collection of papers. I think this volume breaks new ground in highlighting the embeddedness of MNE subsidiaries in multiple contexts, and it will be of considerable interest to scholars engaged with institutional analysis. However, I also believe that researchers interested in regional embeddedness, the geography of innovation, and knowledge management will find new angles to their work in this collected volume.’
– Sarianna M. Lundan, University of Bremen, Germany

Multinational companies are crucial actors in a global knowledge-based economy, combining the advantages of global and locally coordinated production and innovation strategies with specific regional and national factors. This book questions how MNCs can best exploit institutionally embedded knowledge, explores the utilization of external institutionally embedded knowledge in corporate innovation processes, and addresses the challenges of embeddedness.

The expert contributors draw on managerial, economic, geographic and sociological perspectives to explore the essential roles of regional and national knowledge infrastructures and the cultural and political environment of MNCs. They build upon, update, and extend the discussion on the regional and national embeddedness of MNCs with new country case studies and comparative analyses, focussing on the relationship between innovation in companies and regional studies. Significantly, the book also establishes a link between two important debates that have hitherto been largely disconnected: Regional studies and international business studies separately address issues that fall within the scope of the book, but do not provide an integrated analysis of the embeddedness of MNCs.

This pathbreaking book goes some way to fill this gap in the literature and as such, will prove invaluable to academics, R&D managers, regional policy makers and students with an interest in international business, business economics, regional studies and organization studies.

Contents:

1. Introduction: The Debate on Corporate Embeddedness
Martin Heidenreich

PART I: CHALLENGES AND VARIETIES OF CORPORATE EMBEDDEDNESS
2. Regional Embeddedness of Multinational Companies and their Limits:
A Typology
Martin Heidenreich and Jannika Mattes

3. The Multi-home-based Corporation: Solving an Insider–Outsider Dilemma
Örjan Sölvell

4. MNCs between the Local and the Global: Knowledge Bases, Proximity and Distributed Knowledge Networks
Bjørn T. Asheim, Bernd Ebersberger and Sverre J. Herstad

5. MNCs, Clusters and Varieties of Innovative Impulse
Philip Cooke

PART II: KNOWLEDGE INFRASTRUCTURES AS EMBEDDING DEVICES
6. Simulating the Role of MNCs for Knowledge and Capital Dynamics in Networks of Innovation
Petra Ahrweiler, Michel Schilperoord, Nigel Gilbert and Andreas Pyka

7. Technological Capabilities and the Regional Embeddedness of Multinational Enterprises. A Case Study of Germany and the UK
Simona Iammarino, Jan-Philipp Kramer, Elisabetta Marinelli and Javier Revilla Diez

8. The Organizational Decomposition of Innovation and Territorial Knowledge Dynamics: Insights from the German Software Industry
Simone Strambach and Benjamin Klement

9. The Impact of Regional Institutional Characteristics on the Location of MNCs – a European Perspective
Knut Koschatzky and Elisabeth Baier

PART III: THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF CORPORATE EMBEDDEDNESS
10. Modes of Regional Embeddedness: Companies in Seven European Regions Compared
Dieter Rehfeld

11. The Pôles de Compétitivité: Regional Innovation Clusters with a French Touch
Christoph Barmeyer and Katharina Krüth

12. Multinational Companies and the Production of Collective Goods in Central and Eastern Europe
Bob Hancké

13. The Role of Multinational Corporations in the National Innovation Systems of the EU New Member States
Rajneesh Narula and José Guimón

14. Conclusion: Corporate Embeddedness as a Strategic and Dynamic Process of Skilled Actors
Jannika Mattes and Martin Heidenreich

Index

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