Building Fitnes for Transfer - Transfering Manufacturing Knowledge Across Borders

A key problem of manufacturing transfer remains that it is often difficult to explain what a company really knows, or why what it does really works. Still, practice indicates that attention is focused on planning the physical move and on the knowledge associated with normal operations. Introduction of a sending and a receiving unit leads to identification of the notion of respectively a dispatching and an absorptive capacity. Whereas the latter has been treated in the literature, the former represents a neglected area. Based on two case studies of relocation processes the paper identifies and discusses elements of dispatching capacity and places it in a model in a broader context.