The relatively low level of internationalization in Japan’s service industries is a cause of real concern among policy-makers and service industry executives. Explanations have focused on distinctive features of Japan’s culture, particularly its service culture, and idiosyncratically...

Offshore knowledge incubation (OKI) denotes the effort by foreign R&D units of MNCs to achieve local embeddedness within the host-country R&D system, even at the expense of remaining detached from the rest of the MNC. An open-ended social interaction and learning process, OKI can be seen as a...

We studied "regional innovation relays" as MNC regional offices that mediate between knowledge generation at the local level and knowledge application at the global level. The significance of the region as a nexus of innovation is illustrated by concrete examples from U.S. and Japanese MNCs. The...

Empirical research on the European operations of 19 American and Japanese multinational companies (MNCs) suggested, first, that the strategic importance of the region did not translate into an enhanced role for regional headquarters, and second, that American and Japanese MNCs are "unbundling"...