International Businesses And Knowledge Transfer Essay

International Businesses And Knowledge Transfer - Essay Example Focusing on this construct, the current discourse will be developed using theory and literature relevant to internationalization while focusing on the main factors driving or contributing to knowledge transfer and development as well as highlight factors, if any, that inhibit this process. An overall conclusion will be drawn based on the findings from the entire study before reflecting on the entire learning and relating the same to practical experiences wherever feasible.  Etemad (2013) stressed that literature points to numerous reasons why businesses decide to explore international opportunities that could be related to internal and/or external factors. Internal factors are usually related to organizational factors such as organizational goals and objectives; and external factors are related to the environmental drivers such as competition in host countries, the huge business potential in international locations/markets, changing workforce demographics and economic situations et c. Based on these factors, organizations adopt different approaches to establish their businesses in international spheres. Based on these approaches, various theories have been formulated to explain the nature and reasons of internationalization of firms, some of which include Vernon’s (1966) life-cycle theory, Johanson and Vahlne’s (1977) Process theories, Bilkey and Tsar’s (1977) innovation-diffusion theories, the internalization theories (Buckley & Cason, 1976) and the Eclectic paradigm of multinationals by Dunning (1988); the latest additions include two models: AAA-framework by Ghemawat (2007) and gateway-hub model by Prahalad and Bhattacharyya (2008).  Knowledge transfer is a part of knowledge management process, which has been comprehensively explained by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1994), and this forms the foundation of all knowledge-related studies in organizations Dalkir.