Identifying Leading-Edge Market Knowledge in Multinational Corporations

In his seminal article, ‘The hypermodern MNC - a heterarchy?’ Gunnar Hedlund (1986) argued that one of the distinctive features of the heter-archical multinational corporation (MNC) is its holographic qualities. By this he meant that knowledge about the whole is contained in each part, which is very different from the archetypal hierarchical organization in which each part understands only its only narrowly defined task. Hedlund acknowledged that such holographic qualities were ‘only a theoretical ideal’ (1986: 24) but his argument nonetheless reinforces a critical point: that large MNCs need to become much better at managing the internal flow of knowledge between units, in order to leverage their geographically dispersed capabilities.