Ram Mudambi

• Ph.D. (Cornell)
• Professor at Temple University

This paper explores the intersection of international business and economic geography through the lens of connectivity and complementarity of locations. Both facets are leveraged by economic agents like multinational enterprises (MNEs). Complementarity highlights the value created by integrating diverse locational assets, addressing why locations a...

Research Summary Powerful geopolitical, demographic, cultural, and technological forces are reshaping MNEs' markets, compelling them to be entrepreneurial in order to successfully adapt and grow. We argue that MNEs can leverage digital technologies to exploit their resources, especially mobile resources, to fuel and infuse entrepreneurship througho...

High-skill migrant workers significantly contribute to advanced economies by directly generating knowledge-intensive assets and serving as bridges to knowledge in their origin countries. However, rising populist sentiment has led to increased immigration restrictions in wealthy economies like the U.S. and the Europe Union. This study examines the i...

High-velocity environments trigger Schumpeterian changes in industry structure, consumer preferences, and technological paths. The ensuing uncertainties lower entry barriers and diminish the efficacy of technological innovations in sustaining the competitive advantage. Further, lower entry barriers encourage forays by new entrants that may use exis...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) remains a preferred mode for multinational enterprises to access international markets, resources, and technology. However, there are vigorous debates in the academic literature about the magnitude of inward FDI spillovers and their effect on the economic growth of host countries. In this paper, we argue that these e...

We draw on the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistics and its effect on cognition, to advance the theory of commercial innovation. We do so by analyzing the association between linguistic structures and innovation output. We evaluate three distinct linguistic categories (grammatical gender marking, the use of second-person pronouns, and the use of first...

Research Summary Global strategy, that is, the analysis of strategy in an international context, has co-evolved with the dramatic changes in the global economy in the 21st century. Research advances have enabled a more sophisticated understanding of how firms develop strategies in an increasingly turbulent global environment in which societal expec...

In this paper, we study the relationship between harmonization in formal institutions and international connectivity in innovation. First, building on institutional theory, we proxy formal institutional harmonization with regulative harmonization. Second, we apply the framework offered by IB and economic geography to inquire into the nature and ant...

In this paper we explore patenting activity in two peripheral economies (Portugal and Greece), to analyze the dispersion of inventor networks. Inventor networks are key conduits through which knowledge flows. Therefore, they can be critical in the catch-up process of peripheral economies – economies that belong to the group of rich countries but ha...

Over the last three decades cross-border innovation has profoundly changed. The global fragmentation of global value chains, increased global connectedness, and pervasive digitalization have contributed to shaping innovation processes that increasingly span country borders. This process of change has involved a wide array of actors (players) in a v...

We analyse the international dispersion of inventor networks engaged in design innovation, by studying a dataset of design patents linked to Norway. Specifically, we examine the extent to which the international dispersion of design innovation is sustained by firms´ organisation-based pipelines, innovation capabilities and star designers’ personal...

This paper contributes to theory building efforts around the concept of knowledge connectivity and its role in suppliers’ new product innovation capability under different inter-firm knowledge pipeline conditions. We use the Taiwanese electronics and IT hardware industries as our study context, given Taiwan’s phenomenal success story in entering gl...

This article argues that innovation in and from emerging economies is largely shaped by the challenges of sustained catching-up with the advanced economies. Just as firms and industries are constantly seeking to upgrade their technological and organizational capabilities, so too are their societies reconfiguring their institutions and networks to i...

In recent years, emerging markets have come to represent the largest share of global GDP and have made gains in economic development and political influence. In turn, emerging market companies have taken on a new level of importance in driving innovation, local development and global competition. Advancing an integrative view that captures the dive...

Research Summary Digitalization has three fundamental characteristics, reprogrammability infrastructural elementality, and intangibility. Based on these characteristics, it is transforming how firms organize for value creation, delivery, and capture. Its intangibility and infrastructural character largely free economic and business activities from...

Technological change that arises outside an industry and is used within it affects entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystems, but remains understudied. In this project we assess the role of financial technology (fintech) innovation in the process of firm entry into the investment advisory sector, bearing in mind that the core of this innovati...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of institutional distance on national innovation systems. Design/methodology/approach This study uses social network analysis to analyze the connectivity between national systems of innovation. A regulative distance index is constructed by coding the European Commission progress reports and...

Much of the rising international connectedness of city-regions has developed from MNEs replacing local connections with (superior) international ones. This often creates local disconnectedness that energizes the current populist backlash against MNE activities. We develop approaches to new IB theory, addressing the interdependencies of MNEs and cit...

Geographically dispersed reservoirs of knowledge represent significant opportunities for multinational enterprises (MNEs), both in terms of feeding the firm's innovation process, as well as adapting technology to new markets. They face serious challenges in accomplishing these tasks, due to the well-known barriers associated with the transfer of kn...

We investigate the role of privatization on the dynamics of innovation. We hypothesize that privatized firms will focus on a narrower set of technologies as a response to increased pressure for profitability and short‐term results, and that privatization will also increase the degree to which they engage in collaborations with external inventors, b...

The international business (IB) literature has always analyzed multinational enterprises (MNEs) as firms that internalize market transactions across national borders. Over the last few decades, these firms have evolved from vertically integrated organizations to network orchestrators that coordinate geographically dispersed economic activities. In...

Migrant and migration policy (MMP) issues have often influenced important international business (IB) research questions, but the last 20 years have seen the emergence of new or “renewed” MMP issues tied to changes in migrant demographics, wealth, skills, home-country provenance, host-country attitudes, and international governance. Articles in the...

Formal intellectual property right (IPR) protections under global agreements are a policy linchpin of the new global knowledge economy. However, we observe that while some emerging-economy firms have successfully transitioned from imitation to innovation, others persist in imitation, sometimes resulting in IPR violations. In this paper, we study de...

The study evaluates the role of global connectivity in a country's regional innovation systems, using Italy as the study context. Two forms of innovation connectivity are analysed: domestic Italian entities connecting to external knowledge sources (‘reaching-out’ processes) and foreign entities connecting to knowledge resources within Italian regio...

Research Summary We analyze power relationships in subsidiaries of multinational corporations. We explain how despite many advances in the literature, there is still an unresolved debate with respect to the critical question of whether subsidiary power is loaned or owned. We develop an overarching framework that encompasses both agency theory and r...

India began the process of market liberalization that opened it to significant interactions with the world economy in 1991. In this essay, we provide an overarching view of the country's journey toward integration with the global innovation and entrepreneurship network. Major nodes in this global network have two major components that may be metaph...

Research summary We review the relationships between institutions and global strategy and explain several clarifications for future research. First, studies need to clarify the standard used to assess quality in institutional dimensions they research rather than let readers assess them from the measures. Second, analyses need to specify the theoret...

Drawing on the experience of firms of various sizes from Francophone Africa, we explore how the internationalization trajectories of frontier economy firms may vary from those predicted by theory. The firms studied followed social, linguistic, cultural, and institutional gradients to internationalize first to France, rather than to neighboring coun...

This paper contributes to theory building efforts around the concept of knowledge connectivity and its relevance in buyer-supplier relationships in global value chains. We use the Pakistani IT industry as our study context. Pakistan suffered a significant adverse perception bias following terror attacks in 2008-09. We based our illustration on the...

The increasing interconnection of local, trans-local and transnational knowledge networks is the outcome of the coevolution of (i) knowledge centers, typically city regions, (ii) epistemic communities that are grounded in and connect these regions and (iii) firms, usually multinational enterprises (MNEs). This interaction has created opportunities...

International agreements and institutions affect innovation in developing countries. We analyze the impact of advanced country multinational enterprises (AMNEs) and supranational organizations on the regulatory adoption of global intellectual property protection standards. In particular, we investigate 60 developing countries that signed the Trade-...

IB scholars have long studied the multinational enterprise (MNE) and now recognize that its ability to capture value stems from its control of bottleneck assets. In contrast, economic geographers and regional scientists have largely focused their attention on the locations within which economic and business systems operate. In this article, we draw...

Spatial transaction costs, defined as the costs of co1ntrolling and coordinating economic activities that are dispersed over geographic space, fell at historically unprecedented rates over the twentieth century (Glaeser and Kohlhase Pap Reg Sci 83: 197–228, 2004). This megatrend underlies the disaggregation of final outputs into narrow, modularized...

International new ventures (INVs) are a popular mode of entry into foreign markets. INVs, those companies that enter foreign markets at inception, often suffer the two liabilities of newness and foreignness, which may increase the odds of their failure. This paper empirically examines the survival of INVs by comparing them with other sequential mod...

The taxation of the multinational enterprise (MNE) has been a continuing concern for policy-makers. We argue that the changing nature of the mobile MNE (e.g., its improved ability to fine-slice the value chain and disperse it geographically) makes it increasingly important to rethink current tax policies. First, there should be more focus on the in...

Populism is rising in many parts of the world and appears from both ends of the political spectrum. I identify two distinct global trends that underlie its rise. First, the rising knowledge-intensity of world output has turned the terms of trade against primary activities like agriculture and mining. Countries that have remained dependent on these...

The rapid development of emerging market firms and their foray into global value chains has attracted significant attention. In this perspectives paper, we draw on case studies from the automotive industries in India and China, to describe the coevolution of domestic firms and advanced economy multinational enterprises (AMNE) entrants. We first sho...

Research summary We briefly review the evolution in the analysis of the boundaries of the firm in global strategy. We explain how initial studies that argued that firm boundaries were driven by the minimization of transaction costs were later complemented by analyses that proposed that firm boundaries were driven by the development and use of resou...

The distribution of creative economic activity over space has been viewed from three distinct perspectives: International business focuses on the multinational enterprise and the location of activities across national borders; economic geography studies the characteristics of the location site; and innovation scholars are mainly concerned with the...

In the examination of outsourcing and offshoring strategies to establish and orchestrate global value chains (GVCs), scholars have focused almost exclusively on two key decision dimensions - control and location - as the primary determinants of these complex organizational structures. However, the dynamic, temporal nature of GVCs can be further exp...

What happens when firms in an oligopolistic industry find themselves lagging behind in a potentially dominant technology? If R&D costs are significant and catch-up is key, technology laggards must turn to each other and open up their innovation processes in order to survive. This article uses a real options framework to explain the motives of bitte...

Recent studies in a wide range of fields have related language to a number of characteristics including trust, cognition, perception, and sense-making. Language is a key aspect of international business, but thus far it has been studied mainly from a cross-cultural perspective (Brannen, Piekkari, & Tietze, 2014). In this paper, we argue that the ef...

We study an emerging industry's technological network in which the patented technologies of the industry are connected to the geographic locations of the inventors. Our research context is the global wind turbine industry. The network maps the geography of the industry's patented technologies over time. It shows the locations' patenting activities...

Innovation is increasingly the outcome of global networks that connect geographically dispersed knowledge centers. The international business (IB) literature has developed a sophisticated understanding of the multinational enterprise (MNE) as an organization generates value by integrating knowledge across national borders. We advance this literatur...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how firms achieve competitiveness by implementing design-driven innovation. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a detailed longitudinal analysis of the design innovation underpinning the Norwegian furniture industry. Using a data set spanning 40 years (1976-2015) of design patents by both Norwe...

This book focuses on the dialectics between spatio-organisational gaps and local contexts that characterise cross-border investments. "Interspatial" investments – be it mergers & acquisitions (M&A) or greenfield investments – are usually characterised by what is referred to as "otherness", i.e. organisational and cultural distances of the firms inv...

Global organizations are inherently complex. The spatial dispersion of activities results in organizational subunits becoming embedded in local host-country contexts that differ from their parents’ home country contexts. These subunits are also embedded in their parents’ corporate networks, causing them to differ from their locally embedded peers....

This Management of Organization Review (MOR) special issue aims to explore the key features of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in India. There is recent evidence that innovation and entrepreneurship dynamics in transforming economies differ from like processes in advanced market economies in significant ways (e.g., Maimone, Mudambi, N...

Research summary We review advances in research methodology used in global strategy research and provide suggestions on how researchers can improve their analyses and arguments. Methodological advances in the extraction of information, such as computer‐aided text analysis, and in the analysis of datasets, such as differences‐in‐differences and prop...

This Management of Organization Review (MOR) special issue aims to explore the key features of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in India. There is recent evidence that innovation and entrepreneurship dynamics in transforming economies differ from like processes in advanced market economies in significant ways (e.g., Maimone, Mudambi, N...

We study innovation networks in emerging markets, where foreign actors have been identified as key sources of knowledge spillovers as well as progenitors of industry clusters. Focusing on connectivity as a channel for international knowledge sourcing, we widen our lens beyond MNEs to include critical innovative actors such as research institutions...

While the study of international entrepreneurship has been dominated by studies of international new ventures, the study of comparative international entrepreneurship has received relatively little attention. We argue that since such international differences are often the underlying drivers for entrepreneurship that crosses borders, this area of r...

Purpose In the modern knowledge-intensive economy, a nation’s competitiveness depends on the ability of its constituent firms to innovate. Extant research in national systems of innovation highlights institutions and public policies toward innovation as key determinants that affect firms’ innovation activities. This paper aims to widen the investig...

In this counterpoint paper we argue that the findings presented by the regional strategy' literature do not capture the full array of global activities of the multinational enterprise (MNE). While this literature makes an important contribution to the field by showing that sales and production activities in the MNE are regionally structured, we arg...

Industrial clusters are a critical component of the competitive viability of economies around the world. However, clusters are not static but evolve in response to technology and competition. This process has garnered interest from scholars and from practitioners, with the focus primarily on local linkages and networks. Although global knowledge ti...

This study explores empirically the relationship between publicly funded schemes to support innovation and the “openness” of firms’ innovation practices. Using survey data from more than 5000 firms in 29 European countries, we find that support policies for innovation, both monetary and non-monetary, are related to an increase in the degree of open...

The study of power and politics in multinational companies (MNCs) has been a niche area of study for both scholars of organization studies (OS) and international business (IB). Further, the awareness of each research community with regard to the efforts of the other has been rather superficial. Hence, bridge-building efforts to cross-fertilize idea...

Spatial transaction costs, defined as the costs of co1ntrolling and coordinating economic activities that are dispersed over geographic space, fell at historically unprecedented rates over the twentieth century (Glaeser and Kohlhase Pap Reg Sci 83: 197–228, 2004). This megatrend underlies the disaggregation of final outputs into narrow, modularized...

The innovation-driven multinational enterprise (MNE) has dominated international business (IB) research for several decades now. Beginning with the award-winning research of Dunning, there have been calls for IB researchers to rediscover the importance of locations. Recent work has emphasized that firms and locations co-evolve with one another, as...

The rise of developing countries is undeniably evident in the global business arena. There is increasing evidence of innovative and highly intellectual business activities from these countries, for example in the form of new drug developments from India and technological innovation from China. These innovations often require searching for and utili...

Over the second half of the 20th century, Indian pharmaceutical firms were nudged by government policies to focus on import substitution. To this end, they were encouraged to produce generic variants of foreign MNEs’ branded drugs. In response, MNE strategies in India became strongly focused on intellectual property (IP) protection, most typically...

Innovation creates significant challenges for firms in high-technology industries. This article examines how the use of external knowledge acquired from mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and joint ventures (JVs) influence the nature of innovative competence in the global pharmaceutical industry. We create a unique database on never-before approved pr...

Concerted efforts at innovation and research and development have placed the Indian pharmaceutical industry on a trajectory of expansive growth

We examine the success of knowledge transfer within an MNE network by unpacking aggregate knowledge flows into individual projects. We assess knowledge transfer performance along two dimensions: utilization of transferred knowledge and transfer cost. We argue that the substitutive versus complementary nature of subunits' activities is a key determi...

To investigate the impact of knowledge-intensive FDI in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, this study analyzes the activity of foreign MNEs operating in this context by exploring their innovative background, the organizational arrangements they use for local knowledge creation and the performance of their local innovative processes. Based on the...

In order to expand, digital businesses need to pivot to new and promising growth areas. Often that means making forays into new fields and taking on seemingly intractable business problems. Consider Google's venture into maps or SAP's Future Factory initiative, ogle’s venture into maps or SAP’s Future Factory initiative, far-reaching projects that...

We study innovation processes in emerging markets, where foreign actors that have been identified as key sources of knowledge spillovers as well as progenitors of industry clusters. We argue that in order to reconcile the location-centric imperative of innovation catch-up and the organization-centric objective of competence creation, we must widen...

Analyzing the comprehensive 35-year patent data set associated with the Detroit auto cluster we confirm that innovation in clusters can increase in spite of a long-term decline in manufacturing activity. The “stickiness” of local knowledge is sustained by: (i) increasing technological specialization at the local level and (ii) growing connectedness...

Purpose – This study aims to employ a resource-based lens to explore the competitive implications of firm strategies under conditions of market commonality and shared resource pools. Design/methodology/approach – The firms’ core capabilities in these environments may focus on operational efficiency, as firms seek to compete under significant resour...

The changing composition and diversity of international investors, e.g., novel ownership types (including state-backed, private equity) and countries of origin, has left policymakers and academic advisers lagging behind in the race to design measures to fulfil the world’s urgent development needs. Social (e.g., pro-inclusion of marginalized or excl...

Competition may be the most important determinant of firm performance. Keywords: the timing of competitive entry; incremental, breakthrough, and architectural innovation; standard-setting and dominant designs; concluding remarks

Research and development (R&D) internationalization is on the rise for advanced economy multinationals (AMNEs) as well as emerging economy multinationals (EMNEs). We study EMNE R&D internationalization by comparing it to that by AMNEs in the context of an emerging, knowledge-intensive industry. We find that these two are fundamentally different pro...

This may sound as though we’ve got our facts backward, but your company can significantly increase its knowledge output by cutting R&D spending. It’s all a matter of when you cut your spending, and why.

Pressured by heightened competition, multinational enterprises (MNEs) are discovering pockets of resources in non-traditional locations. This study proposes a dynamic model explaining the role of MNE subsidiary entry timing, entry mode and mandate in the process of transforming a peripheral area of an advanced market economy into an ‘emerging clust...

We know that proactive R&D managers make bold moves between R&D-based exploration and exploitation, while earnings manipulators make discrete changes to R&D spending in an effort to meet earnings objectives while avoiding detection. Using a new empirical approach that distinguishes between proactive R&D managers and earnings manipulators, we identi...

In recent years, as multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries have become more closely linked to international networks, their knowledge intensity has risen, and some of their R&D has gained a more creative role. Simultaneously, and often connectedly, many subsidiaries have acquired considerable strategic independence in all aspects of their ope...

In today’s interconnected world, there is ever greater need for developing new ways of coordinating, organizing, and reconfiguring of organizational structures and routines across inter and intra-organizational boundaries. Consequently, the boundary spanning function has become critical in global organizations. Despite its importance, there is limi...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the innovation trajectory, and knowledge pipelines of mature industry multinational enterprises (MNEs). The ability to innovate constantly amidst a turbulent and competitive environment is often the key force behind MNE survival and dominance. Design/methodology/approach – This stud...

This comprehensive and thought-provoking Handbook reviews public sector economics from pluralist perspectives that either complement or reach beyond mainstream views. The book takes a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach, drawing on economic elements in the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, history and law. © Francesco Forte, Ram Mud...