Search results

This volume of Progress in International Business Research includes a selection of 13 papers from the 35th European International Business Academy (EIBA) annual conference, which was held in Valencia (Spain) from the 13 to the 15 of December 2009. Following the usual guidelines for EIBA annual conference organization, papers submitted to this conference had a double-blind revision process. The acceptance rate for oral presentations was 68%.

The fifth volume of the Book Series Progress in International Business Research combines two basic themes in international business studies. On the one hand, global interdependence continues to rise, even though it looked as if the financial and economic crisis of 2008 and its aftermath would retard or stop the globalization process. On the other hand, firms engaged in international activities keep testing out new organizational structures that reconfigure their boundaries. Property rights over assets and control over decisions within and across these boundaries are central to the design of the multinational organization. Although the boundaries of the firm were originally stressed by Reginald Coase in his famous Economica article of 1937 (Volume 4, pp. 254–266) about The Nature of the Firm, the increasing complexity of international activities and the changing relationships between countries and regions make this into a continuous research challenge in international business.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of technological resources and external research partners on the export performance of Italian high-tech small and medium firms (SMEs).

Methodology/approach – Drawing on the resource-based view as theoretical framework and deriving hypotheses from the export management literature, we used a sample of Italian manufacturing firms to run a two-step analysis. First, a Levene's test is conducted to assess whether SMEs operating in the high-tech sectors differ from those operating in other manufacturing sectors. Second, employing ordinary least squares (OLS) regression we analysed which technological resources and external research partners best discriminate the export performance of high-tech SMEs.

Findings – Our empirical results revealed that: (1) the use of output rather than input measures of innovation better captures the contribution of technological resources on export performance of firms in our sample; (2) product innovations positively and significantly affect the export performance of technology intensive SMEs; (3) among external research partners, universities provide positive spillover effects on their export performance.

Originality/value – This study provides the heterogenic perspective of the high-tech sectors when attempting to explain the influence of technological resources and external research partners on the export performance of SMEs. Second, the study expands the traditional measures used in the literature for firms’ technological resources and it comprehensively analyses innovative inputs and innovative outputs while exploring whether innovative efforts have had a measurable effect on the export performance of high-tech SMEs.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to analyze the factors that lead firms to offshore advanced tasks.

Methodology/approach – The study uses a 1,500-firm survey from Denmark to investigate the offshoring of 12 tradable manufacturing, technical, and service activities across different industries.

Findings – Findings indicate that offshoring of advanced tasks is driven by a different set of strategic motives than previous waves of offshoring, which predominantly included simple and standardized routine tasks. While the lower cost of unskilled, labor-intensive processes is the incentive for firms that offshore less advanced tasks, a desire to broaden and deepen global networks of new knowledge spurs highly knowledge-intensive companies to offshore more advanced tasks.

Originality/value of chapter – We propose that offshoring should be analyzed on a more disaggregated level of analysis than is the norm in mainstream offshoring literature. To reflect the trend whereby firms are “slicing” their value chain in finer and finer parts and locate these in various locations around the world, offshoring should be analyzed at the task level, since this paves the way for a richer understanding of offshoring strategies and processes.

Purpose – We investigate whether the partnership behavior of Japanese partners in their joint ventures (JVs) with European partners in Europe can be explained by the Trojan horse hypothesis (THH) view or by the cooperative specialization (CS) view. The THH view assumes that Japanese firms establish JVs to steal the knowledge of their partners and dissolve JVs as soon as they have achieved their goals. The CS view, on the other hand, argues that Japanese firms set up JVs to achieve CS and that these JVs will be stable.

Methodology – First, we derive implications of both the THH and the CS views for the longevity of JVs. Second, we make a census of all Japanese–European JVs manufacturing in 1987 and analyze their evolution to 1996. Third, we count how many of these JVs have evolved in ways that are predicted by the THH and the CS views. We argue that a particular view is supported if the number of JVs following the predicted path is larger than that following alternative paths.

Findings – We find that the partnership behavior of Japanese firms is more consistent with a CS view than with a THH view.

Limitations – This is a conservative test of THH behavior since JVs can dissolve for other reasons than the knowledge-stealing behavior of their Japanese partners.

Value of chapter – This is, as far as we know, the only study that has investigated the evolution of the population of Japanese–European JVs in Europe and has derived implications for the validity of the THH and CS views of JVs.

Purpose – The purpose of this conceptual chapter is to discuss the limitations of the network organization in multinational corporations (MNCs). Since many IB/IM publications concentrate on the advantages of this organizational form, the focus of the chapter is on identifying the limitations that MNCs need to be aware of when they use network organizations.

Methodology – The analysis is based on a sound review of the literature that refers to the network organization in general and its application in MNCs.

Findings – The chapter shows that MNCs present a context that can aggravate the problems of a network organization. Four types of problems are identified: (1) knowledge transfer between MNCs’ subunits, (2) trust-building and corporate culture within MNCs, (3) subsidiary development and subsidiary managers’ stress, and (4) additional problems of a more general nature.

Practical implications – As a result of these problems, it is expected that the formal, hierarchical structure will remain an important organizational instrument for MNCs. The chapter specifies in which ways the formal organizational structure can help to reduce the limitations of the network organization. Finally, the chapter argues that, among the formal organizational models, the matrix structure should be considered more intensively in the future.

Originality/value of chapter – Since existing discussion of the network organization in MNCs tends to ignore the limitations and downsides of this organizational form, the chapter contributes to a more balanced understanding of the network organization.