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It is often assumed that Chinese multinationals invest overseas to obtain knowledge. Acknowledging political ties as an important aspect of Chinese multinationals, we investigate the respective interests of headquarters and subsidiaries to support knowledge transfer from host countries to China. Based on data from 177 headquarters-subsidiary relationships, our findings indicate that political ties of Chinese headquarters increase the organizational distance between headquarters and subsidiaries. This distance has a positive impact on headquarters’ demand for subsidiary knowledge transfer, but a negative effect on the subsidiaries’ willingness to actually transfer knowledge. This suggests that Chinese multinationals with strong political ties have to spend efforts in aligning the motives of headquarters and subsidiaries concerning knowledge transfer practices. This study contributes to the research on Chinese multinationals, cross-border knowledge acquisition, and the springboard perspective by shedding light on post-internationalization managerial challenges related to a knowledge-seeking strategy.

International audience; New business ventures have rather limited resources, generally suffer from liabilities of smallness and newness and rely on external business relationships, typically with suppliers, for developing and acquiring necessary resources. Yet, to date, research on how new ventures develop initial relationships with suppliers and how these affect the nascent business has been limited. Taking the business network perspective and relating it to studies of supply chain and supplier involvement in product development, our study contributes to the rather limited body of knowledge on new ventures' supplier relationships. Empirically, we draw on a longitudinal, in-depth single-case study of the first two years of operation of a start-up. Our study shows that the development of the key initial supplier relationships starts from open-ended expectations of mutual future relational benefits and involves a stepwise ‘inter-definition’ of solutions in interaction between the parties. We observe that interdependences arise between the new venture and its key suppliers and these enable but also limit, the development paths of both partners. We argue that the key initial supplier relationships extend a new venture's resource and capability base and are an integral part of a new venture's business model.

While research on reshoring generally focuses on the host-country to explain why a company brings its previously offshored activities back home, this paper stresses the relevance also of the home-country context. Specifically, relying on the IMP (Industrial Marketing & Purchasing) perspective we show how offshoring and reshoring processes and decisions are both enabled and constrained by the micro-interactions and interdependencies in the industrial networks stretching over the home-country and the host-country. This work relies on a longitudinal case study about an Italian manufacturing firm to develop a model indicating how offshoring/reshoring is a long-term process which unfolds depending both on the focal firm's strategy and on its interplay with the embedding network. Next to this interactive process perspective, we contribute to the literature on reshoring and the global factory also the concept of “selective reshoring”, whereby companies bring back a very specific sub-set of activities, which were previously fine-sliced and offshored, and re-embed these activities in their local home context. The more flexible and selective nature of this relocation of activities between different supply markets depends both on the firm's strategy and on the structure, overlap and evolution of the network elements located in the home- and host-country contexts.

The purpose of this study is to test the assumptions of the headquarters parenting advantage in multinational firms within the context of subsidiary innovation processes. Specifically, we explore the relationship between the selective involvement of headquarters in both innovation development and transfer processes and their related performance in a data set of 85 innovation projects analysed with structural equation modelling. The findings provide only limited support to the parenting advantage logic as they show that although the headquarters are able to select subsidiary-level strategic innovation processes, their involvement is hampering the performance of these processes. Consequently, we offer new extensions to the reasoning behind the parenting advantage logic by introducing four complementary theoretical explanations for the potentially harmful effects of headquarters' involvement in subsidiary innovation-related activities.

Innovation augmentation via internationalization is motivated by headquarters entrepreneurial role in Chinese multinationals. Drawing on the parenting theory, this paper investigates the effects of headquarters' political ties and the degree of internationalization on headquarters competence contribution to subsidiary and the extent of reverse innovation transfer. Based on a survey of 177 subsidiaries in 99 Chinese multinationals via two questionnaires, the empirical results show that, while the degree of internationalization enhances both the headquarters' entrepreneurial role in providing competence to subsidiary, and subsidiary reverse innovation transfer efforts, the strength of headquarters' political ties in the home country has detrimental effects on the degree of internationalization and on headquarters' competence contribution to subsidiaries, which eventually hinders reverse innovation transfer practices. This means that, although internationalization may unlock benefits for Chinese multinationals, their political ties may hinder their fulfillment. This study contributes to parenting theory and to research on firms' internationalization, particularly in the context of emerging-market multinationals.