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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.

The global burden of antibiotic resistance is tremendous and, without new anti-infective strategies, will continue to increase in the coming decades. Despite the growing need for new antibiotics, few pharmaceutical companies today retain active antibacterial drug discovery programmes. One reason is that it is scientifically challenging to discover new antibiotics that are active against the antibiotic-resistant bacteria of current clinical concern. However, the main hurdle is diminishing economic incentives. Increased global calls to minimize the overuse of antibiotics, the cost of meeting regulatory requirements and the low prices of currently marketed antibiotics are strong deterrents to antibacterial drug development programmes. New economic models that create incentives for the discovery of new antibiotics and yet reconcile these incentives with responsible antibiotic use are long overdue. DRIVE-AB is a €9.4 million public–private consortium, funded by the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative, that aims to define a standard for the responsible use of antibiotics and to develop, test and recommend new economic models to incentivize investment in producing new anti-infective agents.

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.

Purpose This paper aims to propose an explorative metamodel of the key organizational competences management and presents a Web-based tool (Co.S.M.O.© Competences Software Management for Organizations) for all-around assessment of the identified competences. Design/methodology/approach Building on the Great Eight Competencies Model- GEC, the European Qualifications Framework-EQF and focus group feedback, an online questionnaire was developed to manage the key organizational competences and to adapt the competence metamodel to the Italian context. Findings The competence metamodel described in this study and its newly designed tool (software with online questionnaire) could be used at the organizational level to improve productivity and efficiency by allowing an easy identification of key organizational competences and facilitating their acquisition and sharing. Research limitations/implications Currently, the metamodel is mainly theoretical and the software sustained only a partial validation. Practical implications The developed tool is a dynamic, easy to use and interactive Web-based software useful for managing the competences in both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Social implications European official documents invite companies and institutions to work together and share human capital: the European Qualifications Framework-EQF, at the base of this model, facilitates a common organizational language for human resources management. Originality/value Managerial competence literature indicates that a comprehensive model capturing a link between the EQF and a managerial competence model has not yet been considered in the literature.

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.

This Article examines the potential stakeholder-related obstacles hindering the implementation of mechanisms to re-ignite the development of novel antibiotics. Proposed economic models and incentives to drive such development include: Public Funding of Research and Development (“R&D”), Tax Incentives, Milestone Prizes, End Payments, Intellectual Property (“IP”) and Exclusivity Extensions, Pricing and Reimbursement Incentives, Product Development Partnerships (“PDPs”), and the Options Market for Antibiotics model. Drawing on personal experience and understanding of the antibiotic field, as well as stakeholder consultation and numerous expert meetings within the DRIVE-AB project and Uppsala Health Summit 2015, the Authors identify obstacles attributable to the following actors: Universities and Research Institutes, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (“SMEs”), Large Pharmaceutical Companies, Marketing Approval Regulators, Payors, Healthcare Providers, National Healthcare Authorities, Patients, and Supranational Institutions.The analysis also proposes a characterization and ranking of the difficulty associated with implementing the reviewed mechanisms. Public Funding of R&D, Pricing and Reimbursement Incentives, and PDPs are mechanisms expected to meet highly systemic barriers (i.e., obstacles across the entire antibiotic value chain), imposing greater implementation challenges in that they require convincing and involving several motivationally diverse actors in order to have much effect.

We design an agent based Monte Carlo model of antibiotics research and development (R&D) to explore the effects of the policy intervention known as Market Entry Reward (MER) on the likelihood that an antibiotic entering pre-clinical development reaches the market. By means of sensitivity analysis we explore the interaction between the MER and four key parameters: projected net revenues, R&D costs, venture capitalists discount rates, and large pharmaceutical organizations' financial thresholds. We show that improving revenues may be more efficient than reducing costs, and thus confirm that this pull-based policy intervention effectively stimulates antibiotics R&D.

Background Antibiotic innovation has dwindled to dangerously low levels in the past 30 years. Since resistance continues to evolve, this innovation deficit can have perilous consequences on patients. A number of new incentives have been suggested to stimulate greater antibacterial drug innovation. To design effective solutions, a greater understanding is needed of actual antibiotic discovery and development costs and timelines. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) undertake most discovery and early phase development for antibiotics and other drugs. This paper attempts to gather a better understanding of SMEs’ targets, costs, and durations related to discovery and early phase development of antibacterial therapies. Methods DRIVE-AB, a project focused on developing new economic incentives to stimulate antibacterial innovation, held a European stakeholder meeting in February 2015. All SMEs invited to this meeting (n = 44) were subsequently sent a survey to gather more data regarding their areas of activity, completed and expected development costs and timelines, and business models. Results Twenty-five companies responded to the survey. Respondents were primarily small companies each focusing on developing 1 to 3 new antibiotics, focused on pathogens of public health importance. Most have not yet completed any clinical trials. They have reported ranges of discovery and development out-of-pocket costs that appear to be less expensive than other studies of general pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) costs. The duration ranges reported for completing each phase of R&D are highly variable when compared to previously published general pharmaceutical innovation average durations. However, our sample population is small and may not be fully representative of all relevant antibiotic SMEs. Conclusions The data collected by this study provide important insights and estimates about R&D in European SMEs focusing on antibiotics, which can be combined with other data to design incentives to stimulate antibacterial innovation. The variation implies that costs and durations are difficult to generalize due to the unique characteristics of each antibiotic project and depend on individual business strategies and circumstances.

This study investigates the effects that expatriate managers' relationships within multinationals have on reverse knowledge transfer. Specifically, drawing on agency theory, we characterize how expatriate managers' relationships with subsidiary local managers, and with headquarters' managers, influence subsidiary willingness and reverse knowledge transfer. Based on a survey of 128 subsidiaries in 73 Chinese multinationals, we show how a good-quality relationship between expatriate managers and subsidiary local managers has positive effects on subsidiary willingness, which acts as a mediator between this relationship quality and the extent of reverse knowledge transfer. The paper contributes to the international business and knowledge transfer literature by generating new insights into whether and how expatriate managers' relationships within multinationals can help reduce agency problems and support reverse knowledge transfer processes. Understanding the potential role of expatriates in relation to reverse knowledge transfer is particularly important within the context of emerging market multinationals employing knowledge-seeking strategies overseas.

This article focuses on emerging-market multinationals and their intent to source knowledge from advanced countries. A single in-depth case study of a Chinese state-owned multinational is used to shed light on the relationship between political embeddedness and the potential to reverse knowledge transfer from advanced market subsidiaries. Specifically, we argue that a strong home-country political embeddedness enhances specific organizational barriers to reverse knowledge transfer, which undermines the strategic intent of knowledge-seeking internationalization, common to much Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) by emerging-market multinationals in recent years. This article contributes to research on knowledge sourcing within the context of south-north FDI by highlighting specific effects of political embeddedness at organizational level, which are critical for the possibilities to reverse knowledge transfer; our study is also relevant to international business, as new empirical insights related to the international organization and management of state-owned multinationals are discussed.

This study focuses on the relevance of different types of innovation for firms’ export performance. Despite ample research on the innovation–performance relationship, previous studies have mainly focused on technological innovations, leaving the effects of organizational innovations relatively unexplored. Hypotheses on the relationship between organizational and technological innovations and firm export performance are tested by structural equation modelling using data from 218 Swedish export ventures. The results indicate that organizational innovation enhances export performance both directly and indirectly by sustaining technological innovation. Moreover, by fine-graining our analysis of the mediating role of technological innovation, according to its radicalness and extensiveness, for organizational innovation, we show how the latter enhances both the radicalness and extensiveness of technological innovation although, notably, only extensiveness is actually beneficial for export performance. This study helps alleviate the scarcity of research examining the links among different types of innovation in relation to export performance and contributes to international business and marketing literature by generating new evidence regarding the mechanisms through which organizational and technological innovations may improve export performance.

This paper investigates headquarters' value-adding role in knowledge transfer. Transfer performance is considered in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness, and a model that includes headquarters' distribution of decision-making rights, resource allocation, and direct intervention is tested on 141 innovation transfer projects. The findings indicate that headquarters have both positive and negative influences on the efficiency and effectiveness of transfer processes. There is thus a need to consider the inherent trade-offs in the choices made in promoting knowledge transfer. © 2010 Gabler Verlag.