The double diamond model contends that both home and host locations affect MNE’s international competitiveness. Drawing on the view that multinationals act as a link between home and host, we extend this framework and investigate theindirect impact of host on home location with reference to R&D internationalisation in emerging economies.
By resorting to a sample of 221 large OECD regions from which R&D investments departed to the top six host emerging economies, we evaluate the contribution of different OECD R&D laboratories to the home knowledge creation of the OECD investing region.
We test the complementarity between domestic R&D and different value-added R&D activities carried out by different technology-intensive R&D laboratories in terms of home knowledge creation of OECD investing regions.
Our findings suggest that the activity of R&D laboratories focusing onadaptation complements domestic R&D in terms of knowledge creation regardless of the technological intensity of their operations, while the activity of medium technology-intensive R&D laboratories focusing ondevelopment is complementary to domestic R&D.