Means of Knowledge Acquisition and Knowledge Transfer Mechanism in the Internationalization Process

This large-scale study explores the performance implications of different combinations of knowledge sourcing and transfer mechanisms of multinational corporations (MNCs). The focus is on transfer of internationalization knowledge. After having acquired knowledge in foreign markets, the MNCs face a choice as to the mechanism used for transferring this knowledge to other units of the corporation. MNCs can use "rich communication media" that are able to transfer experiential knowledge as acquired originally. Alternatively, the MNCs may aim to codify the knowledge in written media in order to transfer it to other units. A wrong choice of transfer mechanism may result in unnecessarily high communication costs or impaired quality of the knowledge subject to transfer. On the basis of data on Danish MNCs the performance implications of the transfer mechanism choice is examined