Foreign subsidiaries of Polish companies – a proposal of research issue

The paper undertakes a discussion on foreign subsidiaries of Polish companies. The scale of Polish foreign direct investment (FDI) continues to grow and this means that soon there may be a gap between business practice and knowledge of management science. The author proposes the hypothesis which states that Polish FDI do not run according to the processes proposed by the phase models (e.g. Uppsala model), but they have a certain degree of leapfrogging. The initial phase of internationalization of Polish enterprises and their motives led the author to the formulation of two other hypotheses regarding the roles foreign subsidiaries play within the Polish international companies. One is that foreign subsidiaries of Polish enterprises play, in most cases, a role called the implementer by typology of Ch.A. Bartlett and S. Ghoshal, and the second is, that in most cases, these are the entities that in the typology of A.K Gupta and V. Govindarajana are called implementor