Knowledge Relevance and Emerging Country Multinational’s Knowledge Transfer Advantage

This chapter develops the proposition that emerging country multinationals’ capabilities, nurtured to meet the demand of large segments of the population in emerging markets, are likely to be more ‘relevant’ to the context of LDCs than the capabilities of developed country multinationals. Relevance is understood as ‘the extent to which external knowledge has the potential to connect to local knowledge’. New knowledge perceived by the recipient as relevant is more effectively transferred and absorbed by the recipients. Emerging country multinationals have a knowledge transfer advantage vis-a-vis developed country multinationals since they can reconfigure their products and technologies to enhance relevance for LDC recipients more effectively and at lower cost.