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In this chapter, I highlight Marjorie Lyles’s contribution to the field of international management. Rather than attempting to present a comprehensive overview of her scientific career, I focus on three areas of her scholarship that I believe have influenced the direction of research in the field. First, I discuss her contributions to the study of organizational learning, both in terms of theory and empirics. Second, I provide an overview of the impact of her pioneering research on knowledge transfer in emerging economies. Third, I summarize her influence on the management profession.

Thanks to the work of Marjorie A. Lyles, we have a clearer understanding about how organizations learn and utilize knowledge, especially in the context of international partnerships. I suggest that her strong impact on the intersection of international business, international management, and strategy, which extends beyond her path-breaking research, can be considered under the categories of learning, collaboration, and context and place.

Organizational learning and the learning-based view of the firm have become popular topics in international business. Despite their popularity, limited attention has been devoted to examination of the organizational and managerial implications to international business. In this chapter is a discussion of how organizational learning impacts alliances and international joint ventures in emerging economies and also in portfolios of alliances. The chapter concludes with a discussion of issues that deserve future empirical and theoretical examinations.

Chinese firms were operating within a closed economic environment before the “opening up” in the late 1970s, but it has only been in the late 1990s that China has recognized the importance of innovation. The Chinese government has attempted to rectify this liability by providing funding to assist Chinese firms in developing innovation capability by increasing R&D collaborations and employing external experts. The purpose of this paper is to study the innovation of Chinese firms by examining how internal and external resources interactively impact the innovation capability.

Panel data collected from Chinese manufacturers are used to test the hypothesized relationships.

The results have shown that the interplay between internal and external resources exhibits differential patterns of impact on innovation capability. The authors discover different moderating patterns of the two types of external resources: visiting experts are helpful in enhancing the effects of internal human resources, while R&D collaborations are useful in exploiting internal financial and physical resources, even when the main effect of financial resources on innovation capability is not significant.

The study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidences on the roles of absorbed external resources and knowledge to catalyze internal resources in building up innovation capability in an emerging economy.

Many theorists describe organizational learning as having three stages: learning, unlearning, and innovation. Little is known, however, about the details associated with each stage, or the impact on performance. We attempt to fill this gap by reporting on a ten-year study in Hungary of the knowledge acquisition process, foreign parent contributions, and new learning capabilities. In transitional economies, firms facing the obsolescence of their socialist managerial skills must learn new approaches quickly. Private firms such as international joint ventures (IJVs) and small to medium enterprises often develop competitive advantages by learning from their foreign parents and creating new learning processes.

During the last two decades, strategic planning has become one of the more important administrative systems for senior‐level executives. Researchers, consultants, and corporate staff have invested a great amount of time and effort in both learning how to design planning systems and training others in ways to do so. Throughout this period, however, the accumulated knowledge and experience has gotten somewhat out of balance. That is, one seems to know a great deal more about how to design strategic planning systems than about how to manage these systems.

Research on large firms shows that cooperative strategies have the potential to improve performance by helping firms gain access to necessary resources, enter new markets, and spread the risk over several partners. Interviews with thirty‐four small business managers show small firms also can profit from using a cooperative network. Highly‐allied small businesses entered alliances to gain resources and based their alliances on a distinctive competence. The highly allied businesses grew more rapidly than the less allied firms. Mutual goals and joint decision making were viewed as critical to the high level of satisfaction achieved.

Describes a simulation that provides an alternative method for teaching managers about the organizational renewal process and about the skills which are necessary to effect change in organizations. The simulation is based on theories about change, diffusion of innovations, and power and influence. It gives the participants a way of being involved in creating change which offers insights into their own capabilities and understanding of the change process.

Analyses four firms to determine if they develop the ability to be selective and to determine what factors have the greatest impact on discrimination. Discrimination skills involve the ability to discriminate or to discern differences among decision situations and to choose appropriate behaviours or actions for each situation. The factors which seem to be most important to the development of discrimination skills are commitment to past success programmes, utilizing people across divisions/structures, and the salience of the situation. The discrimination skills were apparent by the decision rules that were developed and told.