eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Innovativeness is an important competitive advantage for many companies in Finland. The purpose of this thesis is to find out how external linkages of multinational companies operating in Finland impact the perceived innovativeness in these companies. Previous research done on external linkages is still quite fragmented as the whole field is quite new in academic literature. This topic is contemporary in terms of most recent theories in international business and investigating the whole area of research has obvious managerial implications. Analysis is based on quantitative data gathered from the largest companies in Finland. The statistical methods used in this thesis are factor analyses and multiple linear regression modeling.

The main finding of this thesis is that the business partner role seems to have some significance over the benefits of receiving resources from external linkages which is an important signal for further research. Otherwise, not enough evidence of making a conclusive decision whether external linkages of multinational companies contribute to innovativeness in these companies was found. The main limitation to this was the small sample size which limited the number of statistically significant variables in the analysis.