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The rapidly evolving competitive global marketplace with its culturally diverse customers has increased demand for multinational corporations (MNCs) to accelerate global innovation. Leaders increasingly face the challenge of facilitating global and local team knowledge in order to improve strategic planning and execution for new products and services worldwide. An unresolved question in this regard is how global leaders can facilitate multicultural team collaboration aimed at improving performance of global innovation initiatives? Addressing this research question, a qualitative study was conducted focusing on the role of global leadership in facilitating multicultural collaboration and global innovation performance. The study included interviews with 105 global project leaders at 36 MNCs with headquarters based in Europe, Asia, and North America. These exploratory findings demonstrate how global leadership behaviors can facilitate cross-cultural collaboration for international project performance.

Introduction: Today the ability of nations to develop and implement innovations is core for their international competitiveness. Ukraine is striving for innovation progress; however, its innovation performance is relatively low. The research problem is to find the bottlenecks, affecting Ukraine’s innovation capability.

Purpose: This study aims to research the national innovation capability profiles, based on cluster analysis, to develop an understanding of drivers and threats for the innovation capability of Ukraine.

Need of the study: The knowledge-based economy, which had already turned into one of the most efficient developmental models of the 21st century, became a key driver of international competitiveness for the leading developed countries due to their progressive structural shifts towards the growth of high-technology manufacturing and knowledge-intensive sectors. These trends are significant to capture for the sake of increasing the innovation capability of the economy of Ukraine.

Methodology: The study is based on the K-means clustering method, which is employed for identifying 10 country clusters based on the indicators of their R&D and innovation activities, which allowed us to assess the innovation capability of Ukraine in comparison with 140 countries of the world. Data selection and normalisation were based on the 2019 Global Competitiveness Report indicators.

Findings: The study showed that Ukraine’s innovation capability problems are typical for most developing countries and are prevalently connected to low R&D expenditures, patent applications, and international co-invention activities. Most countries, except for the technologically developed ones, follow the so-called ‘passive technological learning’ strategies, which usually result in low economic productivity.

Practical implications: Several innovation policy implications have been developed for the government of Ukraine based on the cluster analysis results and accounting for the problems of the national innovation system (NIS).

This chapter offers novel insights into how global corporations can innovate to tackle the global waste crisis and gain sustainable competitive positions. Using two of the most prominent types of global waste crises – food and plastic wastes – we discuss the dilemma of food and plastic waste, why innovations in global firms are needed to address them, and argue that a different perspective among those firms is needed, one which conceptualizes the development, dissemination and use of innovations in waste management, and one which recognizes that innovations, thus, created contribute to advancing the creation of economic, environmental and social value. We conclude using an overarching conceptual framework that depicts the complexity of the new perspective.

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to advance knowledge on how firms should rethink and develop their innovation architecture by leveraging emerging market opportunities.Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a conceptual framework comprising the drivers and consequences of innovation architecture across emerging and developed markets. It also highlights emerging market innovation characteristics using detailed examples.Findings/conclusions – Most of the future growth in the global economy will come from emerging markets. Successful global firms will have to rethink and develop their innovation architecture by leveraging innovations developed for emerging markets. By balancing the long-term costs and benefits of innovations in both developed and emerging markets, global firms can successfully reshape their innovation architecture.Practical implications – From a practical perspective, the paper provides guidelines to executives for managing innovation architecture across emerging and developed markets. Innovations appropriately developed and launched in emerging markets have the potential to expand global consumer base and increase shareholder value.Social implications – From a societal standpoint, the paper helps improve consumer welfare in emerging markets by offering a roadmap to develop safe, relevant, and affordable products for mainstream customers. Reverse innovations, developed primarily for emerging markets also benefit consumers in developed markets and enhance their social welfare.Value/originality – The paper provides an original theoretical contribution in an important and underexplored research area – emerging market innovation. It is the first to develop an in-depth analysis of innovation architecture, advance a conceptual framework of the role of emerging markets in the development and consequences of innovation architecture, and offer a roadmap for strategic management of innovation architecture. Academic researchers, practitioners, and policy makers will benefit from this paper.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to scientifically verify the credibility (prove or disprove) the existing argument for the global technological inequality within the conflict of traditions and innovations, as well as from the perspective of social consequences of the innovative development of the economy and the basics of conflict management.

Design/methodology/approach: A review of existing sources of research literature has shown that they formed an insufficient scientific basis for determining the essence and scope of social consequences of the innovative development of the economy and the basics of conflict management in terms of global technological inequality. The method of comparative analysis of statistical data over time is used to fill the identified gap in the scientific knowledge system in this chapter. The top 10 countries of the world, which are characterized by the highest level of the innovative development of the economy, were chosen as the objects of study.

Findings: This chapter presents a review of facts determining that there are arguments for the conflict of traditions and innovations against the backdrop of global technological progress from a scientific perspective, a conflict that has social consequences for the innovative development of the economy and the basics of conflict management. Today, the protection and promotion of national interests are being increasingly determined by digitalization as the primary function of diplomatic services. For example, cybersecurity affects national security; web platforms support the economic well-being of citizens and companies; the Internet contributes to the development of healthcare, education and other essential social services, especially during the crisis caused by the COVID-19.

Originality/value: It is expected that wide introduction of high technologies in developed countries will reduce the competitive ability of currently less industrialized economies of Asia and Africa in terms of cost of labour, will increase the technological gap between them and developed countries that will diversify their economies and create more jobs. In the past, countries such as China, Mexico, Brazil and several Asian countries were climbing the income ladder, transferring labour force and capital from the relatively inefficient agricultural economy to the more efficient products and services. Today, there are fears that high technologies and Industry 4.0 will revolutionize these conventional development processes, making a thorny path even more thorny, and will lead to conflicts of traditions and innovations as a source of global technological inequality.

The Globally Networked Organization (GNO) is an archetype of the geographically distributed, globally integrated, and organizationally networked information-age multinational enterprise. While its organizational form has been widely discussed, methods for providing strategic direction to all or part of a GNO have been largely overlooked. We propose the concept of strategic animation as an innovative leadership approach to strategic management in the GNO and offer a set of guiding principles for installing such a system in organizations. Strategic animation employs sophisticated incentives to motivate voluntary buy-in, utilizing principles of self-organization to replace the command and control of the unitary firm and the uncertainty and transactional costs of real markets. This makes possible virtual integration of the multiple highly separable businesses that comprise the value-added proposition of the firm and encourages the development of emergent processes for both exploitation and renewal of assets. From a scholarly perspective, this model suggests a new framework for studying the strategic direction of GNOs. For practice, it offers an organizational solution to conditions where process control is preferred, but command of resources is limited. Strategic animation, set in motion through multiple managerial actions, facilitates the timely and flexible responses to chaotic environments that are the sine qua non of today’s global businesses.

The increasing pace of global competition has recast the balance between multinational corporations’ (MNCs’) needs to protect the knowledge that underlies their competitive advantages and their needs to continually create new knowledge. This essay will discuss MNCs’ knowledge-seeking strategies as industry-level phenomena. I will argue that knowledge-seeking strategies demand a concept of industries both as arenas for competition and as global knowledge networks within which firms collaborate to innovate. Contemporary MNCs face challenges to function not only as self-contained production systems that internationalize in the search for efficiency and markets, but also as open systems globally seeking knowledge and innovations. Metanational strategies and organizations represent a new response to these challenges. I present empirical evidence of distinctive metanational industry opportunities and organizational responses from the emergence of the global flat panel display industry. The essay concludes with a framework that outlines the characteristics of a global knowledge-driven generic strategy as an alternative and synthesis of generic product-driven strategies of cost-leadership and differentiation.