MNE Cross-border Knowledge Sourcing: A Commentary

The MNE’s proficiency sourcing knowledge across borders is its raison-d’être. The broad knowledge sourcing overcomes the liability of foreignness and facilitates competitive advantage. Understanding the processes of subsidiary learning in local environments and alliance partners and then sharing within the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) is of immense importance to MNE management. This commentary summarizes and critically reflects on two chapters dealing with these issues, Chapter 7 and Chapter 8. The chapters nicely complement each other, one taking a subsidiary perspective and the other a headquarters perspective. Together they span ways of learning through captive, alliance, and market modes from foreign locations. Although there are exciting areas that are not investigated here the two chapters surface many matters for further research and pave the way for a range of urgent projects. MNE innovation performance through foreign knowledge sourcing and cross-border sharing continues to be a vibrant research area and subsidiaries’ roles in innovation processes remain at the centre of contemporary research.