Organizational Model of Intellectual Property Protection Strategy of Multinational Corporations

Many studies at home and abroad show that various strategies of enterprises, including intellectual property strategy, determine the organizational structure, and a suitable organizational structure will promote the realization of their intellectual property strategy. Therefore, the change of enterprise strategy inevitably requires the appropriate adjustment of its organizational structure. The intellectual property strategy and business activities of multinational companies at different stages of development inevitably require the design of organizational structures that match their strategies.

When designing its organizational model, multinational companies need to consider many influencing factors, such as enterprise intellectual property strategy, patent technology development, enterprise life cycle, environmental factors, enterprise scale and organization and local culture, as well as the management tradition and historical development of the organization. Take multinational companies in the United States, Europe and Japan as examples. Due to the management tradition and historical development, their organizational models have different characteristics.

European multinational companies disperse consortia. When European enterprises implement the internationalization strategy in the early stage, they find that the local governments of the countries where their target markets are located are often forced to adopt high tariffs and discriminatory laws against multinational companies to protect the domestic market. In order to change this unfavorable situation, multinational companies often set up factories in the local area, giving local subsidiaries great autonomy and relying on local subsidiaries to improve their products and marketing methods to meet the needs of the local market. In this way, a loose consortium composed of independent local subsidiaries is finally formed, and each subsidiary mainly pays attention to its own local market.

A consortium of American multinational companies. In the process of internationalization, American companies have adopted different organizational models from European multinational companies. Because most American companies tend to decentralize management, and are controlled by complex management systems and experts as a whole, the company headquarters controls the company's business information, so the company's top management can control these free-running independent subsidiaries and guide their development direction. At the same time, although foreign subsidiaries often freely improves its products and strategies to reflect market differences, their dependence on the new products, procedures and ideas of the parent company determines that they are more easily coordinated and controlled by the headquarters than the decentralized consortium, which leads to the American-style coordination consortium.

Japan's centralized management model. When Japanese companies expanded internationally in the 1970s, their strategy was not to compete in markets where European and American competitors had advantages. They mainly explore the international market through their brand-new, efficient and large-scale factories, take advantage of cost advantages and quality assurance, and implement strict centralized decision-making and control measures for product development, procurement and manufacturing. It is in this context that Japanese enterprises tend to choose the organizational model of centralized management.

Through the comparative analysis of the above organizational models, we can find that the main benefit of global product structure is the improvement of efficiency, while the main benefit of global regional structure is the timely response to the local market. However, when multinational companies require local companies to have the ability to respond to the local market sensitively, to make effective use of global economies of scale and to have a strong global learning ability, the traditional international business department structure and global functional structure obviously cannot meet this requirement, so some enterprises try to adopt a new organizational model-transnational network organizational structure. Such as ABB, Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Philips. Network organization borrows the concept of network from neurophysiology and computer science, and is a new organization form based on the application of information technology. At present, there is no clear and unified definition of network organization in academic literature, but the author believes that network organization is a collaborative system with IT as the working platform, various economic ties formed between enterprises and social organizations and between functional units within enterprises in the process of cross-border resource integration as the link, and connected by activity nodes. Transnational network organization is a network organization formed between internal and external units of multinational corporations based on some mechanism. It divides enterprises into many different types of centers or business units around the world, replaces the traditional vertical organization with the free market model and operates according to the principle of "flexible centralization".

As mentioned above, the basic organizational structures that enterprises can adopt in the process of internationalization mainly include transnational parent-subsidiary company structure (export department or international business department), global functional structure (global regional structure, global product structure and global matrix structure) and transnational network structure, which have different characteristics and applicable conditions.

Various organizational models of multinational corporations have their own advantages and disadvantages, and also have different applicable conditions and scopes. When designing the organizational structure, enterprises need to comprehensively consider various influencing factors. Generally speaking, transnational parent-child structure is more suitable for the initial stage of international operation, which pays little attention to global strategy and local strategy; The global regional structure can effectively meet the strategic requirements of "thinking globally and acting locally"; The global product structure has a stronger global vision; Global matrix structure is mainly a transitional structure, which is not ideal in enterprise practice; With the development of information technology and knowledge management, when enterprises have high requirements for global strategy and local strategy, transnational network structure often becomes an ideal choice. Transnational network organizations have stronger flexibility, adaptability and competitiveness, and also represent the future development direction of organizational design of multinational companies.