Cited by 3,993International Business and FDIInnovation and Knowledge ManagementOutsourcing and Supply Chain Management

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 31 of the 31 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 14 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Knowledge of the Firm and the Evolutionary Theory of the Multinational Corporation

Open access
Kogut, Bruce, Zander, Udo·1993·Journal of International Business Studies

Abstract

Firms are social communities that specialize in the creation and internal transfer of knowledge. The multinational corporation arises not out of the failure of markets for the buying and selling of knowledge, but out of its superior efficiency as an organizational vehicle by which to transfer this knowledge across borders. We test the claim that firms specialize in the internal transfer of tacit knowledge by empirically examining the decision to transfer the capability to manufacture new products to wholly owned subsidiaries or to other parties. The empirical results show that the less codifiable and the harder to teach is the technology, the more likely the transfer will be to wholly owned operations. This result implies that the choice of transfer mode is determined by the efficiency of the multinational corporation in transferring knowledge relative to other firms, not relative to an abstract market transaction. The notion of the firm as specializing in the transfer and recombination of knowledge is the foundation to an evolutionary theory of the multinational corporation.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8490248

Cites

31 of 31 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

60 Own interpretation · 9 Own result · 8 Own method · 7 No full text of the sources · 5 Sources not found · 5 No basis given

Show all 56 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 25
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 15
38 of 38
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The 35 Swedish innovations and 82 transfer cases are representative of technology transfer by multinational corporations generally.

    “The innovations were identified from a studyby Walhmark andMcQueen [1986] on 100 majorSwedish innovations.”
    “The sample size of the tests thus consists of the eightytwo instances of the transfer of the capability to manufacture.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Markets are imperfect even if they rarely fail, and human behavior can be motivated by self-interest.

    “Markets, even if they rarely fail, are imperfect; human behavior can be motivated by self-interest.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Knowledge transfer is not trivial even within the firm.

    “That the transfer of knowledge is not trivial even within the firm is a fundamental observation.”
3 of 3

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

1 of 1

Citations

Cites

Show all 29 references

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. [7]7. Quintus Type Steel Press for Use in the ASEA-STORA Process 1962 (ASEA)
  2. [15]15. Isostatic Press for Steel Processing 1967 (ASEA)
  3. [33]33. Casson, Mark. 1987. Thefirmnand the mlarket.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  4. [39]39. Hall, G. & R. Johnson. 1970. Transfers of United Aerospace Technology to Japan. In Raymond Vernon, editor, The technology factor in international trade. New York: Columbia University Press.
  5. [44]44. Hymer, Stephen. 1976. The international operations of national firms: A study of direct investment. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (reprint of Ph.D. thesis, Department of Economics, MIT, 1960).
  6. [45]45. Johnson, Harry. 1970. The efficiency and welfare implications of the multinational corporation. In Charles Kindleberger, editor, The international corporation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  7. [53]53. Nunnally, John C. 1978 (second edition). Psychomletric theory. New York: McGraw Hill.
  8. [55]55. Rogers, Everett. 1962. Diffusion of innovations. New York: Free Press.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 2,801–2,900 of 3,993

Metadata

Authors
Kogut, B., & Zander, U.
Affiliations
  • University of Pennsylvania (US)
  • Stockholm School of Economics (SE)
Venue
Journal of International Business Studies
Published
1993-12
Volume
24
Issue
4
Pages
625-645
ISSN
  • 0047-2506 (ISSN-L)
  • 1478-6990
OpenAlex
W3152457815
Cited by
3,967
References
29
Citations by year
2026: 83 · 2025: 89 · 2024: 80 · 2023: 100 · 2022: 102 · 2021: 107 · 2020: 111 · 2019: 139 · 2018: 157 · 2017: 166 · 2016: 164 · 2015: 196 · 2014: 222 · 2013: 220 · 2012: 214
FWCI
43.92
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
Journal of International Business Studies (publishedVersion, public-domain)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › International Business and FDI
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Innovation and Knowledge Management
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management Information Systems › Outsourcing and Supply Chain Management
Keywords
multinational corporations, evolutionary theory of the firm, tacit knowledge, knowledge transfer, wholly owned subsidiaries, firm specialization, internal knowledge transfer, technology transfer

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-09-28, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

A second model labelled each claim on 2026-09-28 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review