Many multinational enterprises (MNEs) have launched new products in overseas market places while conducting their R&D activities mainly at home. However, in these past 10 to 20 years, as a result of the geographical dispersion of scientific and technological knowledge creation, and in the emerging market, these companies now conduct their R&D activities, in collaboration with other institutions at home and abroad.
Traditional knowledge creation theories, however, including strategic management theories, have hardly highlighted the impact of cross-border collaborative R&D activities on knowledge creation processes and the dynamic interconnectedness between R&D facilities from the perspective of the source of global competitiveness and dynamic capabilities.
This study has analyzed the case of Kao Corp., P&G., and Unilever to examine how far these MNEs leverage overseas human R&D resources that can be regarded as knowledge creation processes. The authors examined three companies’ papers published in the US, UK, and Netherlands. As a result of the analysis, the authors find that there is an increasingly dynamic knowledge creation mechanism as one of the global open innovation systems. This mechanism was promoted by the cross-border and inter-institutional collaborative R&D activities by these MNEs. These tendencies would enhance the theoretical importance of the management of the new knowledge creation process as the main resource of dynamic capabilities of companies.
Knowledge Creation, Globalization of Collaborative R&D Activities, Dynamic Capabilities
