The battleship strategy: The complementing role of born globals in MNC's new opportunity creation

In the high-tech industries, new innovations affect a multinational company's (MNC's) competitive advantage. This article empirically explores why and how MNCs complement their in-house R&D by forming strategic alliance constellations with small, innovative born globals. We focus on loose, non-equity opportunity-seeking co-opetitive relationships. We call this approach the battleship strategy. The critical elements of an MNC's battleship strategy include an open innovation commercialization strategy and creation of forums for facilitating open innovation and capturing ideas generated externally. Hence, we suggest that MNCs may externalize some of their innovation activities while gaining a competitive advantage through access to open innovation. This article contributes in several ways to earlier research focusing on the strategic alliances and networks formed between MNCs and born globals by examining the relationship from an MNC's perspective.