Title: International long term business relationship, communities of practice and innovation: a longitudinal case study of NDDB, India and Tetra Pak, Sweden

Authors: Subroto Roy, Ian Wilkinson

Addresses: Marketing and International Business Department, School of Business, University of New Haven, West Haven, CT, USA. ' School of Marketing, University of New South Wales, Australia

Abstract: This paper is a longitudinal study of the impact of a long-term international business relationship on innovation. It traces the market entry of the Swedish Company, Tetra Pak into India. The case focuses on major packaging material manufacturing innovations carried out by the Indian Joint Venture (JV) managed by the Indian partner. A JV relationship is found to provide a context for technical specialists to interact and develop explicit and tacit knowledge and skills. These interactions create wider communities of practice involving networks of suppliers and customers, who in turn create further knowledge and innovation.

Keywords: business relationships; buyer-seller relationships; communities of practice; dairy industry; India; innovation; interaction; knowledge creation; longitudinal study; market entry; networks; packaging; sticky information; Sweden; tacit; technology transfer; joint ventures.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTTC.2004.005613

International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation, 2004 Vol.3 No.4, pp.454 - 469

Published online: 30 Oct 2004 *

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