A general explanation of global innovation development of multinational enterprises from advanced and emerging markets

Global innovation is becoming a key for advanced (AMNEs) and emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) to gain competitive advantages. The objective of this thesis is to find a general explanation of MNE global innovation development. We achieve this by applying a comparative approach to gain a better understanding of the nature of the differences between AMNEs and EMNEs. International business theories suggest that firms develop competitive advantages at home first before exploiting them in overseas markets, while recent studies suggest that EMNEs do not generally have competitive advantages before internationalization and they develop their competitiveness using global innovation. Incorporating such difference in our analyses of MNE global innovation provides valuable opportunities for exploring (1) a unifying explanation of MNE global innovation model - how AMNEs and EMNEs rely on headquarters vs. subsidiaries differently to innovate, (2) a general explanation of how MNEs operate in host countries - how overseas subsidiaries of AMNEs and EMNEs benefit from parent MNE competence and host environments differently, (3) a unifying explanation of MNE technological development - how innovative subsidiaries of AMNEs and those of EMNEs enable their parent MNEs to pursue different technological strategies.

In order to achieve the objective, our empirical analysis incorporates datasets at MNE-level (Paper 1), subsidiary-level (Paper 2) and the level of technologies owned by innovative subsidiaries of MNEs (Paper 3). Our sampled MNEs are from two emerging markets (China and India) and four advanced markets (France, Germany, Italy and US) during 2006-2014. Through the in-depth theoretical and empirical investigation, this thesis contributes to theorize a general explanation of MNE global innovation development.