HOW DO MNC-HEADQUARTERS ADD VALUE?
Focused Issue of Management International Review
Guest Editors:
Björn Ambos, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Volker Mahnke, Copenhagen Business School
This focused issue of mir will discuss how MNC headquarters add value.
Research on value-added by MNC corporate headquarters focuses on either
control or subsidiary initia-tives, but neither is sufficient in the modern
MNC. Because MNCs are increasingly charac-terized by globally dispersed
knowledge creation and exploitation, corporate strategy needs to address
the governance of entrepreneurial opportunity recognition across regions
and ex-ploitation of resources across international markets at the same
time. This focused issue seeks to publish phenomenon-based research, new
empirically corroborated frameworks, as well as new insights on a MNCs
corporate strategy processes. In particular, we are looking for fresh data,
new perspectives, and theory development on how and why corporate head-
quarters add value. What do MNC headquarters actually do? How are they
allocating re-sources, knowledge and attention to their subsidiaries in
their strategy process? How are corporate functions perceived by
subsidiaries? When do they add rather than destroy value?
Examples of areas in which submissions would welcome:
• How to determine usefulness and value added by MNC headquarters?
• How does the MNC headquarters govern entrepreneurial opportunity
recognition?
• How to measure the impact of knowledge sharing on MNC subsidiary
performance?
• How do MNC headquarters design decision structures and
participative processes of crafting corporate strategy?
• How do MNC headquarters influence power distribution in the
firmwide network?
• How do MNC headquarters influence the process of tapping into
regionally dis-persed internal/and external sources of innovation?
• How do regional headquarters add value in searching for valuable
knowledge and exploiting it across regions?
Submission date: February 28th 2008.
Please send electronic submissions to
Volker Mahnke,
vm.inf@cbs.dk
Björn Ambos,
bjoern.ambos@wu-wien.ac.at