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Leveraging Foreign Subsidiaries’ Skills

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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management

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Abstract

Perhaps the most important step in the strategic evolution of multinationals in recent decades has been an increasing willingness to allow subsidiaries to generate distinctive skills and competences and then to leverage these towards wider group-level competitiveness. Seeing this as a process of interdependent individualism points to two key issues in the analysis of the phenomenon. First, how do such subsidiaries generate their individualized scopes? What are the knowledge sources drawn into their creativity? A second key theme is to what extent and in which ways are subsidiary-level competences leveraged so as to be interdependently related to group-level programmes for competitive regeneration. If such subsidiaries are closely monitored in a proscriptive manner this may stifle sources of potentially rewarding diversity and consign the group to very mundane inventive potentials. But allowing them too much independence in creative initiative may provoke anarchy, with unrelated projects adding up to an incoherent agenda for future competitiveness.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Middlesex University, London, UK

    Marina Papanastassiou

  2. University of Reading, School of Economics, HUMSS 192, Whiteknights, RG6 6AA, Reading, UK

    Robert Pearce

Authors
  1. Marina Papanastassiou
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  2. Robert Pearce
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marina Papanastassiou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. GSBPP, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA

    Mie Augier

  2. Berkeley Research Group, LLC, Emeryville, CA, USA

    David J. Teece

  3. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    David J. Teece

Copyright information

© 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature

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Papanastassiou, M., Pearce, R. (2018). Leveraging Foreign Subsidiaries’ Skills. In: Augier, M., Teece, D.J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-00772-8_352

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