Knowledge Accumulation and Innovation in Internationalized Production Networks: The Automotive and the Iron and Steel Cases

MORERO, HERNÁN ALEJANDRO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 9th Globelics International Conference; 2011

The Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems (Globelics)

The purpose of this paper is to study the relative relevance of the domestic sources of knowledge for the innovative performance of firms that operate in internationalized production activities in a developing economy. A National System of Innovation approach from a Production Network (PN) perspective is adopted to analyze two internationalized PNs in Argentina: The Automotive (APN), organized around foreign subsidiaries of Multinational Companies (MNCs); and the Iron and Steel (IPN), organized around a domestic MNC’s headquarter. A Multiple Factor and a Cluster Analysis were carried out using data for 163 firms from a specific technological survey. A different innovative performance was identified according to the complementarities of knowledge sources: The best performance is positively related to a certain balance between domestic and foreign sources, although in the IPN case the international linkages are less important. The findings of this empirical paper are confirmatory of the working hypothesis in the following direction: i) the level of internationalization of industrial activities does not reduce nor extinguishes the importance of national sources of knowledge; ii) for those internationalized PNs organized around domestic MNCs’ headquarters, the best innovative performance underlines the relevance of some foreign knowledge sources, as regards PNs organized around foreign subsidiaries.