Under what conditions does a multinational enterprise's (MNE's) investment in a developing country produce spillovers for local firms operating in the same industry? In this paper I view firms as unique configurations of tacit and codified knowledge, and I propose that the strategies pursued by an MNE will determine whether the investment will create positive externalities, through knowledge diffusion and provision of public goods, or negative externalities, through a crowding out effect on indigenous enterprises.

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between firms' strategies to share knowledge with their innovation system and innovative performance. The empirical analysis showed that many firms designed strategies to share technological knowledge with competitors, and those firms that shared knowledge with their innovation system earned higher innovative performance than firms that did not share knowledge. In addition, firms that interacted with their global innovation system earned higher innovative performance than firms that interacted with only their national innovation system. These results should help managers and researchers understand how to devise technology strategies in globally integrated industries. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This cross-national study explores the relative contributions of academic and corporate research to subsequent industrial R&D activities within one industry. Japanese university research emerged as less influential than Japanese corporate research. The difference between the relevance of U.S. university and U.S. corporate research was only marginally significant. In both countries, university research appeared to contribute most to domestic firms. These findings accentuate the role that national institutional structures play in influencing a country's university research activity.

In this paper, I test the common assumption that Japanese firms strive to appropriate knowledge from the global scientific community while sharing little in return. I found no support for this conventional perspective in the flat panel display industry. U.S. firms shared no more knowledge with their global scientific community than Japanese firms. Similarly, Japanese firms appropriated no more knowledge from the global community than their U.S. counterparts.

We articulate opportunities and challenges for governments and innovating firms operating within countries that display four types of national political institutional structures. We argue that corporatist and associational institutional structures influence governments' capabilities to support diffusion- and mission-oriented technology policies and firms' tendencies to engage in bricolage or breakthrough approaches to technological entrepreneurship. We then show how the relative strength of state institutions can amplify or compromise governments' policies and firms' innovation strategies.

We suggest that firms' national institutional environments alter the logic of alliance partner selection and associated knowledge acquisition. We posit that cross-national variations in corporatist institutional structures (which reflect differences in underlying cooperative norms) influence the relative importance that firms place on a prospective partner's social value (evidenced from the partner's connectedness with members of its industry) and technological value (reflected in the technological complementarity and novelty of the partner's knowledge). We expect that as prospective partners' technological value increases, the probability of alliance formation increases the most for firms residing in less corporatist countries. Likewise, as prospective partners' social value increases, the probability of alliance formation increases the most for firms in more corporatist countries. We further argue that norms regarding knowledge acquisition within an alliance vary across countries, with deliberate learning approaches serving as the norm in less—not more—corporatist settings. We expect that such differences will lead to more immediate interpartner knowledge acquisition in less corporatist environments. Analysis of a longitudinal cross-national data set of alliances in the emergent fuel cell technology industry supports our arguments. Our findings highlight the significance of particular national institutions in specific organizational domains and the complementarity between institutional theory and other strategic resource-based perspectives in the context of interorganizational alliances.

This study introduces and validates a measure of country institutional profile for entrepreneurship consisting of regulatory, cognitive, and normative dimensions. Subscales based on data from six countries show reliability, discriminant validity, and external validity. The instrument provides researchers with a valuable resource for exploring why entrepreneurs in one country may have a competitive advantage over entrepreneurs in other countries and how specific country-level institutional differences contribute differently to levels and types of entrepreneurship.