Djerdj HorvatAbsorptive Capacity in auswärtigen Niederlassungen multinationaler Unternehmen

About this book deutschenglish

Global markets increasingly require the knowledge-intensive activities of multinational companies to be distributed geographically. This means a shift is taking place in the role of their foreign subsidiaries from purely low-cost production sites to active research and development (R&D) units that contribute decisively to the company’s innovation processes. To meet the requirements associated with this, the foreign subsidiaries of such firms are expected to show an appropriate level of local innovativeness. This innovativeness is closely connected to their absorptive capacity.

In this context, Djerdj Horvat develops an approach for the management in multinational companies (MNC) to evaluate and design the absorptive capacity of their R&D units abroad. The author operationalizes the two-dimensional absorptive capacity concept and further develops this for foreign MNC’s subsidiaries. In his empirical analysis, he identifies different combinations of routines in potential and realized absorption capacity and describes them in detail. He then integrates them into a dynamic process model and explains how different turning points within knowledge absorption can result in different process flows.