Geographically concentrated industry activity creates pools of skilled labor and specialized suppliers, and increases opportunities for knowledge spillovers. The strategic value of these agglomeration economies may vary by firm, depending upon the relative value of each economy, and upon firm...

Do firms take advantage of differences in innovation across locations? Recent research establishes that firms, motivated by geographic differences in technological capabilities, locate close to innovation sources to seek technology. We explore which technology sources attract firms and how...

The literature on location choices has mostly emphasized the impact of location and firm characteristics. However, most industries with a significant presence of multi-location firms are oligopolistic in nature, which suggests that strategic interaction among firms plays an important role in...

Learning processes lie at the heart of our understanding of how firms build capabilities to generate and sustain competitive advantage: learning by doing, learning by exporting, learning from competitors, users, and alliance partners. In this paper we focus attention on another locus of learning...

In 1991, Hartwall and Pripps made the decision to found Baltic Beverages Holding (BBH) and invest in the former USSR by buying Estonia's biggest brewery, Saku.Learning Objective: To illustrate the challenges firms face as the geopolitical and economic environment in which they operate changes,...

The Finnish brewer Hartwall and the Swedish brewer Pripps had to decide how to react to the rapidly changing European political, economic, and business environment in 1989-1990.Learning Objective: To illustrate the challenges firms face as the geopolitical & economic environment in which they...

By late 2009, Nokia was grappling with the decision of whether to recover its leading position in the high-profit developed markets, where they were losing market share to the likes of Apple and Samsung, or defend its market leadership in the low-margin, high-volume emerging markets. This case...

Despite the many advantages offered by technology clusters, firms located in them face the risk of losing valuable knowledge to nearby competitors. In this study, we argue that multi-location firms strategically organize their Ramp;D activities to appropriate the value of innovations generated...

In 2010, Logoplaste, a top 10 manufacturer of rigid plastic containers, was debating a more dramatic expansion strategy as a means to guarantee the company's continued success. The company, which began with a few plants in Portugal in the 1990s, now had 60 plants across five continents and was a...