Gone are the creatures of yesteryear? On the diffusion of technological capabilities in the ‘modern’ MNC

This paper probes the extent to which the rise of the ‘modern’ multinational corporation (MNC) has come with significantly altered patterns in the emergence and diffusion of technological capabilities across units of the MNC network. It draws upon a database containing the complete U.S. patenting history of 24 Swedish multinationals over the 1946–2008 period, which allows us to trace both the emergence and subsequent intra-firm diffusion of...