Do emerging market multinational corporations headquarter-subsidiary relationships foster subsidiary innovation and performance in developed markets?

How diversification of overseas subsidiaries affects parent company innovation performance: evidence from China’s multinationals

“…How multinational corporations lay out their overseas subsidiaries has attracted broad academic attention. In previous studies, scholars usually regarded the overseas layout of multinational corporations as simple geographical expansion, focusing on factors such as the geographical location ( Kafouros et al, 2012 ; Deng et al, 2020 ; Luo et al, 2021 ; Mao et al, 2023 ), market share ( Lenihan et al, 2023 ) and access to resources of subsidiaries ( Wang and Zhang, 2023 ; Gurkov and Morley, 2024 ). However, with the acceleration of globalization and the increasing competition in the market, more and more scholars have begun to realize that the functional positioning of subsidiaries is crucial to the long-term competitive advantage of enterprises ( Meyer et al, 2020 ; Papanastassiou et al, 2020 ; Christofi et al, 2021 ; Brock and Hitt, 2024 ).…”