Subsidiary strategies for local knowledge creation and protection in high technology clusters: influencing the location choice of innovative activities by the MNE

Drawing on insights on firm-location co-evolution, we adopt a longitudinal approach to investigate how subsidiaries operating in highly competitive clusters orchestrate linkages with horizontal partners to manage their knowledge imperatives. We show that subsidiaries establish heterogeneous patterns of interaction depending on the type of horizontal agents and the stage of cluster development. We reconcile the strategic deterrence and physical attraction theses by recognising that, after the first location decision at the MNE-level is made, the issue of sourcing and protecting knowledge is mainly managed at the subsidiary-level, and the prominence of the two divergent theses shifts with the cluster evolution.

Biography
Majella Giblin joined the School of Business and Economics in September 2016 as a lecturer in Management. Previously she was a lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the School of Business, Trinity College Dublin. She was awarded a Ph.D. in innovation systems and industrial clusters from the School of Business & Economics at NUI Galway. She also holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree and Master of Economic Science degree. Prior to her current position, she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Centre for Innovation & Structural Change at NUI Galway, funded under the fourth Irish Government’s Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions. As a Postdoctoral Researcher she developed her interests around industrial clusters and innovation systems in the medical technology and software sectors. Previously she has worked as a Lecturer in Business at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology and was employed as an economic consultant with the company, GDSI Ltd. In addition to research and teaching activities within Trinity, Majella held the position of Executive Committee member of the Institute for International Integration Studies, Program Management Board Member for the TCD-UCD Innovation Academy, and was involved in an inter-disciplinary working group on Connected Healthcare Solutions. Majella was an alumni member of the Whitaker Institute for Innovation and Societal Change and is actively involved in working groups with the Irish Medical Device Association. She has published in international peer-reviewed journals, including 4* journals, written book chapters, and presented at numerous national and international conferences. She has been successful in a number of research proposal applications including the award of a Government of Ireland IRCHSS (Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences) Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2008 and a Royal Irish Academy Postdoctoral Mobility Grant in 2010. Such awards have allowed her to explore innovation from a macro (e.g. national and global innovation systems) to a micro (e.g. entrepreneurship, networking for new product development) level. In this regard she has worked on OECD, EU as well as national-level projects.

This seminar is one of a series of seminars in the Whitaker Ideas Forum seminar series.  Dr Giblin will be representing the Innovation and Structural Change Research Cluster.