Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Introduction

In a global economy, success depends on accurately reading and responding to environmental complexity and competition (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989, 2000). Organizational learning would appear to be a prerequisite for surviving in the global context (de Geus, 1988: 7; Hamel and Prahalad, 1994). Moreover, the diversity of peoples and environments in which multinational corporations (MNCs) operate should increase the potential number and sources of innovations and learning. As Cohen and Levinthal note, ‘interactions across individuals who each possess diverse and different knowledge structures will augment the organization’s capacity for making novel linkages and associations—innovating—beyond what any one individual can achieve’ (1990: 133). The MNC can thus be seen as a set of networked repositories of knowledge and capabilities (Leonard-Barton, 1995; Kogut and Zander, 1992; Gupta and Govindarajan, 1991; Zander and Zander, 2010). Makino and Inkpen’s chapter in this Handbook focuses attention on the fact that potential for learning—what they term exploration—can in fact lead MNCs to invest in other countries. While there has been some research into how MNCs can tap the knowledge potential of their global networks of people and units (e.g. Nohria and Ghoshal, 1997), the exploration of the processes that enhance global knowledge transfer is still growing (e.g. Brannen and Peterson, 2009; Reiche et al., 2009).

The need to understand the processes of global knowledge transfer ...