External Knowledge Acquisition And Upgrading Of Export-oriented Enterprises On National Value Chains

Traditional research based on GVC theory emphasized greatly that export‐oriented enterprises from developing countries could easily achieve the goal of upgrading by mean of embedding into GVC, because they were supposed to be able to learn a lot of useful and crucial knowledge from flagship firms in the same GVC. However, facts tell a different story that export‐oriented enterprises will not surely get what they want from those flagship firms. Rather, they are more likely to be locked in the low value area where they can only earn the least profit.Scholars have subsequently done a series of empirical research on the upgrading of export‐oriented enterprises from developing countries and drew similar conclusions that these enterprises could only fulfill some low class upgrading like process upgrading and product upgrading, but could not realize functional upgrading, since flagship firms would block the knowledge transfer process once those affiliated enterprises threatened their interests.It is one of the important research questions of industrial economics how export‐oriented enterprises from less developed countries can break through the low‐locked condition exerted by flagship firms in the same global value chain. In this study, we put forward an analytical framework based on theories of GVC and organizational learning, trying to answer this question by taking enterprises’ internal upgrading mechanism into account, which is enterprises’ external knowledge acquisition and transfer. Our research results show that reverse‐internationalization is a conductive process through which an export‐oriented enterprise can finally realize goals of product and process upgrading and even functional upgrading in NVC, in way of transferring what it has learned from GVC’s flagship firms to its home market and then enhancing its own technological and marketing capabilities. What’s more, export‐oriented enterprises with different participation mode of internationalization behave differently in regards to its knowledge learning behavior, thus lead to differentiated upgrading results.