From Global to Metanational: How Companies Win in the Knowledge Economy

STMicroelectronics, a semiconductor company, is a firm that is at home in the world. Its headquarters are scattered across Europe, split between Geneva, Paris, Milan, and Amsterdam. STM's units and subsidiaries carry the name of town or cities in which their are located, not of countries or continents. Indeed, there are no national subsidiaries, and national flags are conspicuously absent. When the CEO was asked by the authors where his company's home base was, he hesitated for a moment then replied, half-jokingly, "Perhaps the world?" Nation-states and their capitals are rather irrelevant when what the company needs to access are pockets of knowledge clustered around localities like Grenoble, Silicon Valley, or Bangalore. Companies like STMicroelectronics see the world as a set of three interconnected planes. Imagine at the top level a map dotted with pockets of technology, market intelligence, and operational know-how, like bright spots representing cities as seen from a satellite at night. This is the map of the knowledge infrastructure that the company needs to access. The bottom plane is the map of operations representing production sites, logistics chains, and distribution channels, like the hubs and spokes between airports as viewed by an airline company. This map will be familiar to traditional multinationals, which have become proficient in managing a global network of production, distribution, and sales. Connecting these two maps is an intermediary plane, where devices described as "magnets" translate new knowledge into innovative products or specific market opportunities. Magnets can take different forms and importance, and they do not necessarily have a physical locus. They are teams of experts built around selected lead customers, global platforms, or global activities, and their mission is to bring together specialist knowledge accessed around the world and to "meld" this knowledge into innovative products or services. These three planes--the bright spots of knowledge, the hubs and spokes of operations, and the magnets connecting them--in turn describe three capabilities--sensing, mobilizing, operating--that a company needs to develop in order to compete in the global knowledge economy. The stakes involved in managing these three planes go beyond the traditional tension between global integration and local responsiveness. They require new forms of organizational structure and strategy, a new breed of multinational firm that the authors describe under the term "metanational". Indeed, exploring this new universe requires a new vocabulary different from the standard terms used in strategic management. Along with "magnets", readers will discover a world of "knowledge hotspots" and "sensing units", where knowledge can be "sticky" and needs to be "melded" into innovative products or services. When I first read this book, I didn't pay it much attention. I thought that the metanational model that was heralded by the authors as the

I was delighted to grab a better understanding on global competitiveness and the new productive opportunities provided by the Metanationals.You don't know about it yet?? God, your business is under great danger...

This is one of the most refreshing books about managing multinationals that I have read. It goes one step beyond the idea of a transnational, proposing a new model of how a company can succeed by prospecting the world for new knowledge about technologies and customer behaviour and using this to innovate. It won't be easy to implement, but the last three chapters provide a good starting point about how to make it happen. I was convinced that if we didn't try and build a metanational we would simply be left behind.