Anoop Madhok
Anoop Madhok
Anoop Madhok
Schulich School of Bussiness, York University CANADA
Anoop Madhok is the Scotiabank Chair in International Business & Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Strategy at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto. He additionally has a professorial appointment at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Vrije University, Amsterdam. He has also been a visiting professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Netherlands, the University of Melbourne, Australia and University of Valencia, Spain, among many others. His research interests span strategy and international business, where he has worked on topics such as multinational firm strategy, foreign market entry, strategic alliances, trust, and the theory and boundaries of the firm. His current research focus is on strategy and entrepreneurship and on multinationals from emerging economies. He has lectured extensively on these topics in a number of countries around the world and his work has been published in most of the leading management and international business journals.
Research stay at UC3M: DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
Project: Towards an action-based perspective on firm competition. How do emerging market enterprises (EMEs) become competitive actors in a global environment still largely dominated by established firms from advanced economies? Traditional theoretical frameworks used in international business and strategic management research typically focus on industry or resource-based explanations of firm competitiveness. These perspectives tend to emphasize what a firm has, such as competitive position or resource possession. The question then arises: what about the ‘average’ firm, i.e., one that does not occupy a significant position in its industry space nor possesses some strategically superior resources relative to its rivals? Going by the more dominant theories, such firms do not have any visible or viable basis for competitive advantage. Yet, in many industries, such firms are not only present and co-exist with their more advantaged rivals but are often even able to challenge the dominance of some of the incumbents.
My proposed project seeks to develop an alternate perspective, based on Austrian economics-based notion of entrepreneurship, that underscores the role of action in explaining the competitive behaviour of emerging market multinationals. Such an ‘action-based’ perspective on competition shifts the emphasis from what a firm has to what a firm does with what it has and may be better suited to today’s business environment, characterized by greater dynamism and disequilibrium, where competitive advantages appears to be more transient in nature. Although multinationals from emerging economies will be my focal context, with minor adaptations the argument can be applied more generally to other seemingly disadvantaged firms, such as newly established entrepreneurial startups.
Stay period: FEB 2015 - JUL 2015
