Smaller and medium sized firms (SMEs) are recognised to be at a disadvantage in innovation since they lack their own R & D base and have few means of access to R & D and innovative technological developments created elsewhere. In this article the author describes the system being developed in...

Is it more or less profitable to diversify? Jacques Liouville made a survey of companies in the German mechanical engineering sector and finds it leads to two interesting lessons. First, unrelated diversification is not to be recommended; second, external growth is preferable to internal if...

Since about 1960, the industrialised countries have intervened to encourage the development of the technologies having a high growth potential. The governments of OECD countries in particular have admitted that the pursuit of economic growth and the creation of new jobs depend upon the...

Purpose: Previous work in international business largely disregards the interplay between home-country conditions and firms’ geographical diversification – implying that, regardless of indigenous conditions, firms can modify their domestic performance (which the authors measure in terms of...

Empirical studies of the shareholder valuation impact of firms’ international joint venture (IJV) participation have usually emphasized firm‐specific factors, but rarely extended their analysis to location‐specific factors. This is a crucial omission because the two sets of factors are...

In a well-known study of joint venture (JV) characteristics, Beamish (1985) compared the attributes and performance of JVs located in developed and developing countries. This study advances Beamish's (1985) work by circumventing some of its key limitations. It compares the structure and...