From Global to Metanational: How Companies Win in the Knowledge Economy (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Jose Santos (Author), Peter Williamson (Author) "THE GLOBAL GAME has changed..." (more)
Key Phrases: metanational advantage, metanational innovation, globally dispersed knowledge, United States, Silicon Valley, United Kingdom (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Metanational" is the term that Jose Santos, Peter Williamson, and Yves L. Doz--management and technology professors at the international INSEAD graduate school of business--coined to describe a new type of global corporation. It refers, they explain in From Global to Metanational, to "a company that builds a new kind of competitive advantage by discovering, accessing, mobilizing, and leveraging knowledge from many locations around the world." And as they unveil and dissect the concept, it becomes apparent that it may indeed be an apt description for those worldwide enterprises most likely to succeed in our rapidly changing times. Based on interviews with 36 companies from America, Asia, and Europe (including long-established firms like 3M and Toyota and newcomers like Acer and Shiseido), the authors describe innovative ways to efficiently tap into "pockets of technology, market intelligence and ... specialist knowledge scattered around the world," rather than relying solely on input from a home nation or a few select locales. They explore how trailblazers are identifying this information wherever they find it, parlaying it into new products, services and processes, and merging the result with all sales, distribution, and marketing efforts. Anyone involved in multinational business should find this both provocative and potentially useful. --Howard Rothman

Product Description

Becoming a global company once meant penetrating markets around the world. But the demands of the knowledge economy are turning this strategy on its head. Today, the challenge is to innovate by learning from the world .

This book provides a blueprint for companies ready to embrace this new globalization challenge. In From Global to Metanational , international business and strategy experts Yves Doz, José Santos, and Peter Williamson introduce a radically different kind of company-the metanational-defined by three core capabilities: being the first to identify and capture new knowledge emerging all over the world; mobilizing this globally scattered knowledge to out-innovate competitors; and turning this innovation into value by producing, marketing, and delivering efficiently on a global scale.

The authors explain why traditional global strategies are no longer sufficient to differentiate leading competitors, what the knowledge economy means for managers, and why opportunities to leverage globally dispersed knowledge are growing. Most important, they outline exactly how managers can build a metanational advantage for their own organizations by:

* Prospecting for and accessing untapped pockets of technology and emerging consumer trends from around the world

* Leveraging knowledge imprisoned in a multinational's local subsidiaries

* Mobilizing this fragmented knowledge to generate innovations, profits, and shareholder value

Drawing from the experiences of pioneering metanationals including STMicroelectronics, ARM, Acer, Nokia, Shiseido, and PolyGram, the book shows how today's multinationals can use their existing global networks to gain an important head start in the global game-and how newcomers can leapfrog traditional competitors by rapidly building a new-style metanational corporation.

Must-reading for every leader-from the CEO of a new global venture, to the executive of a currently successful multinational, to the founder of an e-business startup getting ready to "go global"-this pathbreaking book shows how to reshape strategies to compete and win in the global knowledge economy.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 258 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Press; 1st edition (November 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875848702
• ISBN-13: 978-0875848709
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #804,790 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Finding knowledge in unlikely places, September 26, 2002

By	Bill Godfrey (Mt Stuart, TAS Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

What does a large company need to concentrate on for sustained success in a globalized world? Doz and his colleagues claim that it is to become metanational and to become good at innovating from a platform of bringing together knowledge from many different parts of the world. Metanationals differ from globalized companies in that they recognise that new ideas, products or directions may originate somewhere other than the corporate centre.

The focus of the authors is on innovation and they argue that this requires that the organization becomes good at :
* identifying where good ideas and special competencies are;
* mobilizing the often scattered capabilities and opportunities (they use the term 'becoming a magnet' for such capabilities); and
* optimising the size and configuration of operations for efficiency, flexibility and financial discipline.

This is a book that makes an important point about success in a globalized world, but presents one factor in success as if it was the whole. As with a number of books, I had an uncomfortable feeling that the content of a very good article was expanded into an only moderately good book.

The core message is important and useful. Organizations that operate on a global scale need to move beyond the extension of a unitary culture into new localities and recognise that new knowledge is found in unlikely places. They need to become excellent at recognising that knowledge, becoming an attractor for it, mobilizing it to provide a superior stream of innovations and operationalizing production, distribution and marketing into diverse markets.

The weakness is that the book is written at a fairly high conceptual level - for all the detailed example - that fails to get to grips with how to manage multiple cultures or the detail of innovation, or the issues of governance across countries. It also has surprisingly little on the major changes that are occurring in world consumer markets.

The book also falls into the 'one size fits all' trap. Issues of being effective globally are very different for a consumer fashion business, a high tech product or service industry and a major commodity business, but this is not recognised explicitly in the book.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must reading for international business, July 22, 2002

By A Customer

This is one of the most refreshing books about managing multinationals that I have read. It goes one step beyond the idea of a transnational, proposing a new model of how a company can succeed by prospecting the world for new knowledge about technologies and customer behaviour and using this to innovate. It won't be easy to implement, but the last three chapters provide a good starting point about how to make it happen. I was convinced that if we didn't try and build a metanational we would simply be left behind.

4.0 out of 5 stars At Home In The World, January 19, 2008

By	Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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STMicroelectronics, a semiconductor company, is a firm that is at home in the world. Its headquarters are scattered across Europe, split between Geneva, Paris, Milan, and Amsterdam. STM's units and subsidiaries carry the name of town or cities in which their are located, not of countries or continents. Indeed, there are no national subsidiaries, and national flags are conspicuously absent. When the CEO was asked by the authors where his company's home base was, he hesitated for a moment then replied, half-jokingly, "Perhaps the world?" Nation-states and their capitals are rather irrelevant when what the company needs to access are pockets of knowledge clustered around localities like Grenoble, Silicon Valley, or Bangalore.

Companies like STMicroelectronics see the world as a set of three interconnected planes. Imagine at the top level a map dotted with pockets of technology, market intelligence, and operational know-how, like bright spots representing cities as seen from a satellite at night. This is the map of the knowledge infrastructure that the company needs to access. The bottom plane is the map of operations representing production sites, logistics chains, and distribution channels, like the hubs and spokes between airports as viewed by an airline company. This map will be familiar to traditional multinationals, which have become proficient in managing a global network of production, distribution, and sales.

Connecting these two maps is an intermediary plane, where devices described as "magnets" translate new knowledge into innovative products or specific market opportunities. Magnets can take different forms and importance, and they do not necessarily have a physical locus. They are teams of experts built around selected lead customers, global platforms, or global activities, and their mission is to bring together specialist knowledge accessed around the world and to "meld" this knowledge into innovative products or services.

These three planes--the bright spots of knowledge, the hubs and spokes of operations, and the magnets connecting them--in turn describe three capabilities--sensing, mobilizing, operating--that a company needs to develop in order to compete in the global knowledge economy. The stakes involved in managing these three planes go beyond the traditional tension between global integration and local responsiveness. They require new forms of organizational structure and strategy, a new breed of multinational firm that the authors describe under the term "metanational". Indeed, exploring this new universe requires a new vocabulary different from the standard terms used in strategic management. Along with "magnets", readers will discover a world of "knowledge hotspots" and "sensing units", where knowledge can be "sticky" and needs to be "melded" into innovative products or services.

When I first read this book, I didn't pay it much attention. I thought that the metanational model that was heralded by the authors as the next frontier for multinational firms was nothing but a theoretical construct, or a kind of anomaly as it sometimes happens in the evolution of species. The business cases that were presented had very little in common, and each story could be interpreted as the result of specific constraints or idiosyncrasies: the Japanese cosmetics company struggling to expand out of its domestic market, the Nordic telecom firm conquering the world starting from an improbable location, the "global startup" pioneering a technology on a worldwide scale without time for regional consolidation or, in the case of STMicroelectronics, a European champion trying to break from its origins as the result of the merger of two state-owned, loss-making companies.

But I now think that Yves Doz and his coauthors were really up to something when they came with this new model, and that recent developments have confirmed their claims. Convergence between industries has increased the complexity of technologies needed for new product development. The knowledge base that a global company needs to absorb is becoming increasingly dispersed around the world. Places in India or China that were unknown a decade ago are now major sources of innovation and market knowledge. R&D is no longer concentrated near headquarters and is now managed on a global scale. New global firms have entered the world stage starting from peripheral or disadvantaged locations. Multinational firms need to relinquish their goal of projecting a homegrown formula and instead seek to build advantage by learning from the world. From Global to Metanational offers them a blueprint toward that goal.