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CM U90 - Managing Innovation in the Multinational Enterprise*

Faculty
Jacob Lyngsie og Marcus Møller Larsen
Course Coordinator
Tamara Stucchi, Ph.D. fellow
Course content, structure and teaching
This course aims to enable students to better identify, understand, analyze, and critically assess the strategic and operational challenges facing firms that seek to exploit international corporate innovation networks to build or maintain their competitive advantage. It will allow students to better engage in managerial and decision-making processes related to international business and innovation and prepare for careers in a global environment of firms that compete on innovation in products, services, and business models.
Globalization and the growing economic importance of knowledge have led firms to increasingly internationalize their generation, acquisition and diffusion of knowledge. While multinational enterprises (MNEs) traditionally retained research and development close to their home base, their innovation processes are now becoming both geographically (internationally) and functionally (value chain) more open and dispersed. In addition to the traditional demands of global efficiency and local responsiveness, successful MNEs today are acquiring and building innovatory capacities on a worldwide basis. This course focuses on the range of strategic, organizational, and geographic challenges introduced in this process.
The MNE depends on its technological and innovatory resources to achieve its objectives. The course considers the characteristics and determinants of corporate strategies for innovation management and the consequence of geographical location for international business. The course discusses technological change as a learning process, inter-company alliances, and the capturing of returns to international innovation and examines issues related to the layout of international innovation networks, divisions of labor, building of local organizations, and headquarter-subsidiary dynamics that are introduced by distributed knowledge generation and application processes. The course will also touch upon national innovation systems, innovation policy and the special circumstances of innovatory activities in emerging economies.
The course will be based on a mix of cases, lectures, discussions, and group work in class. There will be two take home assignments with subsequent student presentations. The course literature is challenging and students are encouraged to form reading groups.
The course's development of personal competences
The course facilitates students’ further development of analytical, theoretical, presentational and teamwork skills.
Learning Objectives
At the end of the course, students should:
  • Be able to identify, understand, analyze, and assess the strategic and operational challenges facing firms that seek to exploit international corporate innovation networks
  • Know, understand, and be able to apply concepts, theories, models and frameworks in the intersection between international business, innovation and technological change
  • Be able to discuss, assess and combine these concepts, theories, models and frameworks
  • Be able to identify and select in specific cases of multinational enterprises problems related to international generation, acquisition and diffusion of knowledge and subject them to analysis and problem solving on the basis of theories and methods
  • Be able to assess and discuss the validity, reliability and scope of generalization for conclusions drawn on the basis of an analysis
Type of examination, exam aids and assessment
4 hour written exam, closed book (written aids not allowed, technical aids allowed), PC exam, using CBS computers
Recommended literature
  • Westland, J. Christopher (2008), Global Innovation Management: A Strategic Approach, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
  • Cantwell, John and José Molero (2003), Multinational Enterprises, Innovative Strategies and Systems of Innovation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
  • Tidd, Joe, John Bessant, and Keith Pavitt (2005), Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organisational Change, Chichester: John Wiley.
  • Narula, Rajneesh (2003), Globalization & technology: Interdependence, Innovation Systems, and Industrial Policy, Cambridge: Polity.
  • Håkanson, Lars (2005), ‘Knowledge Transfer in Multinational Corporations: An Evolving Research Agenda’, Management International Review, 45(2).
  • Pearce, Robert D., Julia Manea, Marina Papanastassiou, Gurkanwal Singh Pooni and Satwinder Singh (1997), Global competition and technology: essays in the creation and application of knowledge by multinationals, Basingstoke : Macmillan.
  • Gammeltoft, Peter (2006), ‘Internationalisation of R&D: Trends, drivers and managerial challenges’, International Journal of Technology and Globalisation, 2 (1-2): 177-199.
  • Havila, Virpi, Mats Forsgren, and Håkan Håkansson (2002), Critical Perspectives on Internationalisation, Oxford: Elsevier Science.
  • Pearce, R.D. (1999), ‘Decentralised R&D and strategic competitiveness: globalised approaches to generation and use of technology in multinational enterprises (MNEs)’, Research Policy, vol. 28, nos. 2-3, pp. 157-178.
  • Patel, P. and Pavitt, K.L.R. (1998), ‘The wide (and increasing) spread of technological competencies in the world's largest firms: a challenge to conventional wisdom’, in A.D. Chandler, P. Hagström and Ö. Sölvell (eds.), The Dynamic Firm: The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organization and Regions, New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Zander, I. (2002), ‘The formation of international innovation networks in the multinational corporation: an evolutionary perspective’, Industrial and Corporate Change, 11(2): 327-353.
Other
The course is a further enhanced version of a course which has already run successfully in the past. This year the course will be restructured around the use of a textbook, combined with cases and supplementary readings.

Last updated by The Electives Office 27/08/2010