Internationalisation of lean manufacturing: The influence of environmental conditions

Abstract

In the last decades many manufacturing firms have launched lean internationalisation initiatives so as to develop high performance foreign subsidiaries and/or suppliers. Several worldwide cases of successful lean adoption suggested the power as well as universality of this managerial method, thus motivating firms to diffuse their knowledge towards geographically-dispersed partners. However, previous projects also shown the difficulty in internationalising lean manufacturing, which sometimes even precluded its effective transfer. In fact, as advocated by some scholars, lean implementation effectiveness can be affected by environmental differences between countries. Although previous studies pointed to several inhibiting factors for lean internationalisation and provided some evidence of their negative impact on diffusing lean management across different countries, the literature is still lacking a holistic framework explaining such relation. In the attempt to provide a more comprehensive examination, this study takes a broad view on factors describing the international environmental conditions-i.e., socio-cultural, political-legal, economic, and educational dimensions-and analyzes their influence on lean internationalisation projects, in terms of problems in diffusing internally related as well as externally related lean practices. To this purpose, we conducted a single in-depth case study concerning two lean internationalisation projects launched by an Italian manufacturer so as to diffuse its lean knowledge towards a Chinese peer subsidiary and suppliers, respectively. Findings from the study can support managers in acknowledging the main criticalities in the internationalisation of lean manufacturing as well as in better understanding reasons behind them, thus helping to reduce lean internationalisation projects' failures.