Abstract
The purpose of our research is to analysis the difference of characteristics and performance of COEs in foreign subsidiaries in Japanese market. The external characteristics indicate characteristics about particular relationships with external stakeholders as customer and competitor. The severity of Japanese market and the positioning of Japanese market among world market were focused as factors of the external characteristics. In case of R&D COEs, the means of learning the knowledge from Japanese firms was added as other external characteristics. The internal characteristics indicate characteristics about internal MNE. Human resource management, decision making, role and characteristics of R&D of subsidiaries were focused as factors of the internal characteristics. Then, we focused on growth rate, operating profit ratio, introduction of a new product, brand image, quality, date of delivery and employee’s satisfaction as performance.
After classifying the sample of foreign subsidiaries in Japanese market into COEs or non-COEs at each function like R&D, production and marketing, we employed t-test to analysis the above difference of external characteristics, internal characteristics and performance between COEs and non-COEs. Our suggestions from the results of analysis were as follows.
We indicated that marketing COEs, production COEs and R&D COEs gained higher performance than non-COEs and the development of COEs was important for MNE. The research suggested that education program and training were effective in developing marketing COEs and R&D COEs, penetration of global management philosophy was effective in developing all types of COEs and share of global strategy was effective in developing marketing COEs and production COEs.
Then there is no difference in score of the positioning of Japanese market among world market and autonomy of decision making between COEs and non-COEs. The results suggested that HQ would not necessarily take a proactive attitude to develop COEs.
