INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

International Business

International Business

Introduction

MNE represents multinational enterprises whereas SME represents small and medium enterprises. MNE have headquartered them in one country and they also operate in other countries. TRIAD refers to the trio of developed countries such as America, Japan and European Union. The alliance networks of MNEs are a virtually non-explored dimension of MNE activity, which is an interesting and new direction for the regional/ global strategies literature. Before firms are able to produce and sell their products, they need to develop access to knowledge capabilities and other resources that are often acquired from their competitors through collaborative agreements. Alliance partners typically provide a mix of skills, expertise, and capabilities that complement each partner's strengths and help achieve the firms' strategic goals. Further, while firms have historically tended to form alliances for basic peripheral activities, alliances "are now employed at various stages of the value chain (Arregle and Beamish, 2009, p. 107)".

The relational view emphasizes the alliance network ties that MNEs form with other partners for increased value creation. What emerges from the international business literature and innovation studies is a story of the globalization of innovation driven virtually exclusively by large multinational corporations (MNCs) with their headquarters in developed countries (Banalieva and Santoro, 2009, p. 355).

Discussion

Firms can form purely regional networks when they limit their search costs to local searches and selection of alliance partners. This, in turn, can increase the efficiency and lower the risk from international expansion beyond the home region for the MNE. Indeed, the liability of regional foreignness can be smaller than the liability of global foreignness as an argument for why so many MNEs focus their geographic activities on their proximate home regions instead of dispersing globally. This suggests that risk of international expansion is smaller within the home region and larger within the global geographic segment. Table 2a illustrates that China and Singapore are the most popular regional alliance partner host countries. Additionally, 12 of the 19 MNEs with purely regional networks are from Japan (Barney, 1991, p. 99).

TRIAD MNE's dominate international markets

MNEs can be viewed as actors in networks of alliances. Social network perspectives conceive of actors (such as firms) as interdependent, and place emphasis on the social, economic, or political network structures of ties that provide actors with opportunities and constraints. Recent research demonstrates that MNEs tend to generate most of their sales revenues from their home regions. By "regional partner," we mean an alliance partner located in a country within the home region but outside the home country of the focal MNE. MNE is an "international intelligence system for the acquisition and collation of basic knowledge relevant to R&D, and for the exploitation of the commercially applicable knowledge generated by R&D." The MNE ties represent the relational view of alliance networks that the social network perspective advances and are at the heart of our study. Such ties help the focal MNE to internalize the resources it obtains from its partners in the network according to internalization theory (Banalieva and Santoro, ...