Abstract
Building on insights from the multi-market competition and knowledge management literatures, this paper explores how firm and competitor scope of activities influences the timing and extent of knowledge diffusion by MNCs. Using a newly created panel of US MNCs and their worldwide operations that I have merged with the Derwent global family patent data, I identify three mutually exclusive types of family patents based on when (or whether) firm knowledge is diffused, including: single-country patents, foreign equivalent family patents and born global family patents. Comparisons across the three family patent categories show that higher firm and competitor scope encourages firms to diffuse their knowledge more quickly, but also reveals that the category with the quickest diffusion (born global patents) are on average less valuable than single country patents. Overall, this paper contributes to our understanding of the global knowledge generation and global knowledge diffusion by providing a comprehensive loo...
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