No 2015/50 The Roles of Emerging Multinational Companies’ Technology-driven FDIs in their Learning Processes for Innovation

A dynamic and contextual perspective

Abstract

This paper is a comparative case study investigating the roles of TFDIs in the learning processes for innovation in two leading Chinese wind turbine companies. It develops a dynamic and contextual analytical framework from a learning-based view to understand the firms’ learning processes for innovation. Based on the analysis and a comparison of the learning dynamics and learning contexts of the two case firms’ learning processes for innovation, the paper contextually theorises the different roles of the case firms’ TFDIs in their learning processes for innovation. The paper identifies two different roles of the TFDIs – the accelerator and the starter – in different contexts of the learning processes. We argue that for developing countries that have the ambition of tapping into the global knowledge and technology pool, domestic industrial capability-building should not be overlooked.