External Knowledge Sourcing:Uncovering the Technology Scouting Process

This paper aims at contributing to the existing literatures on multinational management, technological search and open innovation by providing a detailed account of the process through which large multinational corporations (MNCs) use technology scouting units to systematically search for new technologies across geographic and organisational boundaries. Our data collection effort has extended over the period of two years; involved more than 50 semi-structured interviews with managers in three continents; numerous field observations and the use of both internal and publicly available archival data. Our findings seem to indicate that this process of search for knowledge across firm and geographic boundaries is filled with many nuances that a simple search-transfer model is not able to capture. Our data shows that this technology scouting process is comprised of six phases (internal scouting, external scouting, assessment, translation, transfer and follow-up)....