International Integration and Mandates of Innovative Subsidiaries in Spain

In this paper, we develop a general framework that integrates diverse driving mechanisms of subsidiaries evolving towards competence creating mandates. The relevant process is the mutual relationship between innovation scope and the internationalization of the market as the primary channel for learning in subsidiaries, and how the opportunity for units to gain competence creating mandates is notably influenced by their embeddedness in export networks. This has direct implications for increasing the international channels for learning and indirectly in terms of the effectiveness of host country development. The framework is applied to a sample of firms in the Spanish economy, a country that does not hold a leading position economically and technologically inside the EU bloc, which suggests that the evidence may be suitable for generalizing the organization and network embeddedness of other catching-up economies.- innovation, mandates, MNC, networks, subsidiaries

The technological relationships between indigenous firms and foreign-owned MNCs in the European regions

It has been argued that the accumulation of technological competence is a path-dependent and context-specific process, being partly firm-specific and partly location-specific. MNCs spread the competence base of the firm, and acquire new technological assets or sources of competitive advantage. For their part indigenous firms benefit from local knowledge spillovers from MNCs, given the access of the latter to complementary streams of knowledge being developed in other locations. This paper examines how the particular corporate technological trajectories of multinational corporations (MNCs) have interacted with spatially-specific resources for the creation of new competence in some of the leading regions in Europe. Yet foreign investments, and the associated skills and capabilities that they bring, are arguably of crucial importance as a catalyst for local growth: learning curve advantages are mainly people- and institution-embodied and regional systems may substantially benefit from global corporations investing in innovation and local human capital. Although a break has thus occurred with the conventional economic approach - in which spatial factors shaping innovation were usually considered secondary (if not thoroughly negligible) - too little is still known about the regional scope with respect to the geographical location of innovatory capacity in the global economy. This is all the more relevant in the presence of an in-depth process of economic integration, as is the case of the EU, which arose from the need to define the problems, and the policies aimed at solving them, in terms of geographical location and centre/periphery economic convergence. We use data on the patents granted in the United States to large firms for inventions emanating from research facilities located in eight selected European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) over a 27 year period (1969-1995). The location-specific patent data is complemented through the use of other indicators such as the regional distribution of expenditure on basic scientific research, and the R&D expenditure personnel given by the EU database New-Cronos-Regio. The aim is to improve our understanding of some aspects of the effects of Innovation and Globalisation on Firms and Regions - i.e. technological spillovers - by examining the patterns of technological (by technological field of the largest firms) and production (by industry of the output of the largest firms) specialisation in each region. Differences between the two specialisation profiles may be indicative of technological diversification by industry, and hence potential technological overlaps between industries. These overlaps may be more pronounced in higher order centres, due to their greater technological breadth (which may show a greater technological diversification within the typical industry represented in the region, and not merely a greater span of industries). We then distinguish between intermediate centres (with significant levels of technologically focused activity) and lower order regions (backward regions, with little activity at all). The patterns of technological diversification of industries are then checked by examining which firms are responsible for a positive technological specialisation in the case of a region that lacks specialisation in the equivalent industrial category, and how this fits into the overall pattern of technological diversification of the firms in question.

The Restructuring of Technological Capabilities through Corporate Expansion

This paper analyses the restructuring of technological capabilities following M&A-based growth in large industrial firms with a substantial technological knowledge base. In particular, we focus on the restructuring of those technological capabilities that are of a general purpose kind (namely ICT) or related to the core capabilities of a firm. We develop and test a conceptual framework grounded on a co-evolutionary view, that relates the motivations and environment for corporate expansion to the firm-specific pattern of restructuring in the composition of corporate technological capabilities. We find that distinct patterns of technological capability restructuring are associated with each combination of the motivations and environment for firm growth. In particular, inter-industry contexts reduce technological relatedness in market motivated expansions, while relatedness has also declined in more recent technology-motivated growth in general. The acquisition of ICT is common as well to both technology-motivated inter-industry deals and more recent market-motivated deals. However, we speculate that any similarities in the outcomes of these alternative motives for firm growth arise for quite different purposes.

Determinants of Internationalisation of Corporate Technology

Based on empirical data at an aggregate level it has been argued that the propensity to internationalise corporate technological activity is higher among firms originating from smaller countries and in less research-intensive industries. However, more disaggregated evidence on the patenting of the world’s largest firms suggests a more complex picture. First, the share of foreign-located activity (through outward investment) depends positively upon the technological strength of each national group of firms in an industry, while the share of foreign-owned activity (through inward investment in a host country) may be deterred by the technological competitiveness of indigenous firms. The degree of internationalisation of technological development depends inversely as well on the extent of localised user-producer interaction in innovation in an industry or in the relevant national innovation system. Second, the largest firms increasingly use international research networks as a means of corporate technological diversification. Thus, when technologically leading groups invest in innovation abroad they tend to switch towards the foreign development of complementary and supporting technologies outside the primary field of their own industry, which tends to remain relatively more concentrated at home. Likewise, while foreign-owned firms in the same industry may be deterred by the intensity of competition in the home centre of a leading national group, strong foreign-owned firms in other industries may pursue their diversification strategies by developing locally the primary technology of that centre (which is not primary for their own industry).Internationalisation, technological development

The laws of non-bivalent probability

Non-bivalent languages (languages containing sentences that can be true, false or neither) are given a probabilitistic interpretation in terms of betting quotients. Necessary and sufficient conditions for avoiding Dutch books—the laws of non-bivalent probability—in such a setting are provided