ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses how local knowledge represents an important value to Multinational corporations (MNCs) and has an impact on strategic decisions on where and how they build and develop their business units. It examines the perspective of the implications for the local economy. The chapter reflects on how knowledge can be transferred across territories, questioning the local/global divide using MNCs as cases. It looks at how they think about knowledge, not least local knowledge. They can shift resources between markets and thereby create local imbalance. MNCs take globalisation as the business strategy, and knowledge management turns out to be increasingly important in the globalised process. Knowledge is progressively exchanged across geographically dispersed individuals and subsidiaries of MNCs, implying knowledge transfer across organisational and national borders. The Eyde cluster was established in 2007 as a co-operation between ten companies in the process industry in the Agder.