• Knowledge Flows within Multinational Corporations: Explaining Subsidiary Isolation and its Performance Implications
  (with Arvidsson, N., Birkinshaw, J.), Organization Science, 19(1), 90-107.

ABSTRACT
Applying a new theoretical and empirical approach to intra-firm knowledge transfers, this paper provides some initial insight to the little-researched phenomenon of why some subsidiaries are isolated from knowledge transfer activities within the MNC. Knowledge transfer is framed as a problemistic search process initiated by the recipient unit. We show that knowledge flows from units that are perceived to be highly capable to units that perceive themselves to be highly capable. Knowledge flows are also associated with existing levels of communication and reciprocity. Taken together, these findings suggest that knowledge transfers in MNCs typically occur between highly capable members of an in-crowd, while the isolated minority rarely, if ever, engage in knowledge sharing activities. Finally, we show that the isolated minority underperforms other subsidiaries, suggesting the possibility of a "liability of internal isolation".

An earlier version of this paper won the Best Paper Award, International Management division, at the Academy of Management conference in 2004.

Read a research brief of this article published at the Sloan Management Review, Winter 2008 issue .

Working Papers

• Connecting the Dots: Uncovering the Technology Scouting Process

ABSTRACT
This paper provides a fine-grained account of the process through which large multinational corporations (MNCs) use specialised subsidiaries (viz. technology scouting units) to systematically search for opportunities to transfer technologies across geographic and organisational boundaries. Our data collection effort has extended over the period of two years; involved more than 50 semi-structured interviews with managers in three continents; numerous field observations and the access to a proprietary database containing detailed information on 149 external technologies that were scouted by one of the largest telecommunication services provider in the world, between January 2003 and December 2005. Our emergent findings indicate that technology scouting goes much beyond external search, involving significant efforts in internal search, translation and matching. More than searching for external solutions, technology scouters spend most of their time trying to identify internal requirements; translating external knowledge to the company's language and matching the external solution to specific needs within the firm. Our findings also indicate that external technologies may be internalised not because of their novelty but because they come with the market proveness that technologies developed internally do not have. Finally, we show that even when the external knowledge is related to the firm's knowledge base, it may be not internalised if it is "dissonant knowledge", i.e. if it challenges the firm's dominant logic. Those results seem to indicate that the benefits of technology scouting may well be the result of the rapid internalisation of confirming and proven external technologies, rather than the identification of weak signals or disruptive technologies. In the final section of the paper, we discuss the implications of our findings for both theory and practice.

This paper was a runner-up for the Temple/AIB Best Paper Award at the Academy of International Business conference 2007.

• External knowledge access versus knowledge protection: A necessary trade-off in open innovation? (with Birkinshaw, J. & Mol, M).

ABSTRACT
In the spirit of advancing our theoretical understanding of open innovation, this paper addresses one specific tension that lies at the heart of the phenomenon – the tension between accessing external knowledge and strategically protecting internal knowledge. We focus specifically on the interaction between the two approaches: we argue that strategic knowledge protection pursued in combination with a strategy of access to external knowledge will—jointly—have a negative effect on innovation performance; we also suggest that this negative interaction effect will only transpire under certain circumstances, depending on the approach used to access external knowledge. Our data set consists of questionnaire responses from the managers of 2,852 firms in 12 industry sectors that participated in the third round of the UK's Department of Trade and Industry Innovation Survey. We receive broad support for the arguments.

Case Studies

I have written several case studies, mostly while working as a Senior Researcher at Harvard Business School's Latin America Research Center.

Some of the cases which I co-authored with HBS faculty members are now taught in many schools around the world (and have been reprinted in different books). They include the case of Embraer, the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer which is the global leader in regional jets; Gerdau, one of the largest steel producers in the world and Grupo Elektra, Latin America's leading specialty retailer.
 
More recently, I wrote case studies on Emirates Airline, Royal Bank of Scotland, and BT Group.

• LBS case studies
• HBS case studies

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