Are You Ready to Learn from Your Offshore Affiliates?

Abstract

Reverse knowledge transfers are beneficial to MNCs, but just how much so depends on the subsidiaries’ strategic mission, its country’s economic development and the ability of headquarters to absorb incoming information. Within MNCs, the traditional role of headquarters as prime source of knowledge and competencies is changing. Increasingly, headquarters act as receivers of knowledge from their internationally dispersed subsidiaries. The efficiency of the MNC as a knowledge-integrating institution is being influenced by changes in both its subsidiaries’ context and its capabilities to process knowledge.

Keywords

• multinational companies
• international subsidiaries
• overseas knowledge
• intrafirm knowledge
• reverse knowledge
• global economy