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Knowledge and Strategy Creation in Multinational Companies

Social-Identity Frames and Temporary Tension in Knowledge Combination

  • Focused Issue: 50 Years of MIR
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Abstract

  • While a great deal of research on international business and management has fruitfully focused on knowledge transfer, this paper investigates knowledge creation; the process by which multinational companies (MNCs) continuously combine and recombine knowledge in order to generate a competitive advantage.

  • By integrating contemporary strategic management research into the field of international business, we have developed a new perspective on strategy and knowledge creation in MNCs, by elaborating on and extending the knowledge-based view and other views of MNC strategy making. We suggest that the agglomeration of a multitude of diverse social-identity frames, nested inside a corporate centripetal frame, creates an arena in which exploitable new knowledge can be created.

  • We propose that while a common corporate social-identity frame promotes knowledge transfer, the diversity of various subgroups’ social-identity frames, in combination, with interaction and temporary tension between them, advances knowledge creation. Although this partly involves a serendipitous process, it promotes a systemic advantage for MNCs compared to local firms, as regards knowledge exploration, (re-)combination, and integration. This competitive advantage is firmly rooted in hard-to-imitate complex social processes and may therefore be sustainable.

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Notes

  1. See, for instance, Teece1977; Mansfield1980; Davidson and McFetridge1985; Kogut and Zander1993; Zander and Kogut1995; Bresman et al.1999; Gupta and Govindarajan2000; Szulanski2000; Subramaniam and Venkatraman2001; Martin and Salomon2003; Minbaeva et al.2003; Song et al.2003; Björkman et al.2004; Buckley and Casson2007; Minbaeva2007.

  2. See, for instance, Ronstadt1978; Håkanson and Zander1986,1988; Pearce1989; Zander1997,1999; Nobel and Birkinshaw1998; Gassman and von Zedtwitz1999; Gerybadze and Reger1999; Granstrand1999; Kuemmerle1999; Asakawa2001; von Zedtwitz2004.

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  1. Department of Marketing and Strategy, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden

    Patrick Regnér

  2. Ragnar Söderberg Professor of Business Administration, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden

    Udo Zander

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  1. Patrick Regnér
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Regnér, P., Zander, U. Knowledge and Strategy Creation in Multinational Companies. Manag Int Rev 51, 821–850 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-011-0110-3

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