International Business

Mne Theory

This guide helps you get your bearings in Mne Theory before you start exploring the interactive timeline, framework graph, and concept maps.

Before You Dive In

Mne Theory studies how firms compete and organize across countries with different institutions, cultures, and risks.
Rough timeline: trade and comparative advantage foundations -> multinational enterprise theory -> global value chains and offshoring -> geopolitics, resilience, and reconfiguration of globalization.
Start with the OLI/internalization family of theories; they anchor most explanations of foreign direct investment.
In Noosaga, compare frameworks by strategic posture: global integration, local responsiveness, or transnational balancing.

Foreign direct investmentCross-border investment with managerial control, not just portfolio ownership.

OLI frameworkOwnership-Location-Internalization framework explaining why firms internationalize.

Entry modeForm of foreign market participation, such as export, licensing, JV, or wholly owned subsidiary.

Institutional distanceDifferences in legal, cultural, and regulatory environments across countries.

Global value chainCross-border distribution of activities from design to production and distribution.

Assuming globalization erased local context; institutional and cultural differences still shape performance materially.

Treating market entry as a one-time choice; mode and governance often evolve as uncertainty resolves.

Confusing country growth potential with firm-level profitability and execution risk.

Open the interactive view and scan the framework timeline. Which frameworks came first? Which ones overlap? Where are the big transitions?

Click into individual frameworks to read what each one claims, where it came from, and how it relates to its neighbors.

See how the key ideas within a framework connect. This is useful for figuring out what to learn first and what depends on what.

Take the quiz for any framework you've read about. It's a quick way to find out whether you actually understood the core ideas or just skimmed them.