FROM INTERNATIONALIZATION OF R&D TO GLOBAL INNOVATION

Abstract:

In the first decade of the 21st century, both managers and academic researchers began to shift their framing of MNE product and process innovation from “R&D internationalization” to “global innovation”. Common to both is the belief that MNEs’ international networks provide a means to promote learning and innovation not available to purely domestic firms. This conceptualization is closely aligned with the so called ‘network model’ of the MNE, first formulated more than three decades ago in the seminal works by Chris Bartlett (1986), Gunnar Hedlund (1986), and C.K. Prahalad and Yves Doz (1987) – as well as in the influential text by Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal (1989).