Entrepreneurship in Multinational Enterprises: A Penrosean Perspective

Zusammenfassung

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This paper applies Penrose's (1959) insights on the quantity of managerial services required for firm-level organic expansion to the analysis of entrepreneurial activities in MNEs. These insights are used to build a framework relevant to entrepreneurial activities in MNEs, and then apply this framework to assess the metanational model (Doz/Santos/Williamson 2001) in terms of the quantity of managerial services required to implement it. Penrose's (1959) insights on firm-level growth processes are still relevant to the analysis of entrepreneurial activities in MNEs. The quantity of managerial services required for the effective functioning of the metanational model appears to be particularly high, and the benefits of this model should therefore be carefully weighed against the potential costs.

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Auszug

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Entrepreneurship in Multinational Enterprises: A Penrosean Perspective

Introduction

A simple observation motivated writing this paper: there is a missing link between Edith Penrose's (1959) seminal book, The theory of the growth of the firm, and contemporary research on entrepreneurial activities in the modern multinational enterprise (MNE). Doz, Santos, and Williamson's (2001) concept of 'metanational' is the latest, mainstream international management attempt to analyze the need for new types of entrepreneurship in the MNE. The rising interest in MNE entrepreneurial activities reflects both the increased geographical dispersion of critical knowledge in the global economy (Cantwell/Iammarino 2001 ) and the differentiated network structure of many modern MNEs (Nohria/Ghoshal 1994, Rugman/Verbeke 1992, 2003).

First, as regards the dispersion of critical knowledge, technological activities show a strong tendency to agglomerate in specific locations, thereby creating narrowly specialized knowledge clusters (Cantwell/Iammarino 2001). This trend requires MNEs to rely on their local subsidiaries both to tap into the knowledge pool in such clusters and to search for profitable opportunities related to the newly acquired knowledge in these clusters. MNE corporate headquarters are often incapable to do so themselves given their lack of proximity to host country or host region conditions (Verbeke/Yuan 2005).

Second, in a differentiated multinational network, each subsidiary possesses an idiosyncratic set of resources, the full benefits of which may only be reaped through subsidiary driven initiatives (Birkinshaw/Hood/Jonsson 1998).

Birkinshaw and his co-authors have analyzed the characteristics, determinants, and processes of subsidiary initiatives, emphasizing the benefits for the MNE as a whole of exploiting the specialized resources present at the subsidiary level (Birkinshaw et al. 1998). This emphasis on the exploitation of dispersed knowledge in MNEs through the pursuit of entrepreneurial activities was pushed further in Doz et al. (2001). Doz et al. (2001) suggested th...

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