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Multinational corporations (MNCs) have increasingly sourced knowledge across borders, and foreign subsidiaries operations have played a critical role in MNC international knowledge sourcing strategies. The growing responsibility of foreign subsidiaries has paralleled an interest on the geography of this phenomenon by international business and international management scholars. In this chapter, we review this research. In addition, based on recent research in economics and management drawing on economic geography and innovation studies, we highlight possible avenues of research to enrich our understanding of the geographical aspects of international knowledge sourcing. In particular, we suggest three lines of research opportunities. A first opportunity relates to the explicit consideration of distance and border effects. A further research opportunity arises from investigating the geographical distance of heterogeneous host country knowledge sources from the foreign subsidiary. A final research opportunity we discuss is about the contribution of heterogeneous host country knowledge sources to the variety of knowledge developed by the foreign subsidiary.

This paper examines the role of location‐specific (L) advantages in the spatial distribution of multinational enterprise (MNE) R&D activity. The meaning of L advantages is revisited. In addition to L advantages that are industry‐specific, the paper emphasises that there is an important category of L advantages, referred to as collocation advantages.

Using the OLI framework, this paper highlights that the innovation activities of MNEs are about interaction of these variables, and the essential process of internalising L advantages to enhance and create firm‐specific advantages.

Collocation advantages derive from spatial proximity to specific unaffiliated firms, which may be suppliers, competitors, or customers. It is also argued that L advantages are not always public goods, because they may not be available to all firms at a similar or marginal cost. These costs are associated with access and internalisation of L advantages, and – especially in the case of R&D – are attendant with the complexities of embeddedness.

The centralisation/decentralisation, spatial separation/collocation debates in R&D location have been mistakenly viewed as a paradox facing firms, instead of as a trade‐off that firms must make.

This volume is the outcome of the 33rd European International Business Academy (EIBA) conference held at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Catania (Italy). This conference brought together more than 300 scholars from around the world to discuss theoretical and empirical issues in international business (IB), as well as their consequences and challenges to IB scholars and policy-makers. Organized around 10 thematic tracks, the conference is the annual forum for discussing major research issues in the IB realm. This volume is a collection of the best papers, which, selected through a blind refereeing process for presentation at the conference, make significant contributions by providing fresh new perspectives on a variety of relevant topics.

The purpose of the chapter is to analyze how firms’ R&D investment decisions are affected by asymmetries in knowledge transmission, taking into account different sources of asymmetry, such as unequal know-how management capabilities and spillovers localization within an international oligopoly. We follow a game theoretic approach and consider a two-country imperfect competition model with two firms – one from each country – producing a homogeneous good. Both the firms’ mode of foreign expansion and R&D level are endogenously determined. We find that a better ability to manage knowledge flows incentivates the firm to invest more in R&D. By introducing geographically bounded spillovers, we also show that one-way foreign direct investment (FDI) stimulates the multinational enterprise (MNE) to raise its own R&D, due to both the elimination of transport cost and a greater ability to source. Furthermore, it emerges that when geographical proximity increases the MNE's capability to source local know-how, FDI is more likely to occur. The originality of this chapter relies on the analysis of the impact of asymmetries within an oligopoly model with endogenous R&D. Differently from other studies, this framework allows us to provide neat analytical results.