Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons^™

Presumptive Adaptation And The Effectiveness Of Knowledge Transfer, Robert J. Jensen, Gabriel Szulanski

Faculty Publications

Adaptation is almost invariably accompanies the cross-border transfer of firm specific practices. The existing literature contains two conflicting approaches to adaptation. The first, more traditional approach, following institutional, motivation, and pragmatic efficiency considerations, presumes that a modified practice can be fine-tuned, stabilized, and institutionalized without consulting a working example and that practices should thus be adapted as quickly as possible to create fit with the local environment. The second approach argues, instead for the need to maintain the diagnostic value of the original practice by adapting cautiously and gradually. In this paper, we report an in-depth field investigation of the …