日系ドラッグストアの東南アジア進出

ツルハタイランドの事例研究

抄録

In recent years, a number of Japanese drugstore companies have expanded their operations overseas. These firms are mainly targeting other Asian countries. Under this circumstance, global innovation has been attracting attention to build a competitive advantage in the Asian market. On the other hand, prior research on global innovation has focused mainly on manufacturing firms, and there have been few studies targeting service firms. Among them, few studies have focused on global innovation in the overseas subsidiaries of drugstores, which have been gaining importance in recent years.

Therefore, this study aims to reveal the process of the overseas subsidiaries of drugstores using the absorptive capacity（ACAP）theory, which has been widely used to explain the innovation process of companies.

The analysis reveals that the overseas subsidiaries of drugstores create new knowledge and innovations by acquiring knowledge from diverse sources including the parent company and the local environment, and by integrating these knowledge sources. In addition, this study confirmed the influence of social integration mechanisms and feedback loops among the factors that have been mentioned in previous studies such as Todorova & Durisin（2007）as factors that promote ACAP. Furthermore, autonomy of foreign subsidiaries from their home parent companies was newly added to the ACAP model as an influence factor specific to multinational firms.

By empirically analyzing the case of the drugstore’s overseas subsidiary and developing an ACAP model suitable for analyzing the overseas operations of service companies, this study contributes to the development of this field.