When Globalization Hits Home: Mobilization Effects in National Innovation Networks

Lead firms are increasingly reorganizing their innovation activities into global innovation networks. Such reorganization has potentially major impact on their existing home-based innovation networks. Based on 31 interviews in four case studies of lead firms in the Danish food industry, the paper analyzes the dynamics of five key features of home-based innovation networks: 1) size of the national networks, 2) type of organization, 3) content of collaboration within the network, 4) concurrent globalization of organizations in the network, and 5) degree of formalization of network interactions. The dynamics are generally differentiated according to the type of lead firm strategy, i.e. knowledge augmenting or knowledge exploiting. The qualitative and exploratory findings point towards some effects on national innovation networks. Hence, the paper concludes by hypothesizing that the globalization of lead firms’ innovation has a mobilization effect on preexisting national innovation networks. The hypothesis says that lead firms’ engagement in global innovation networks can mobilize the organizations that are part of the lead firms’ innovation networks at home. This mobilization effect differs according to the lead firm’s strategy.