Specialisms
- International business strategy in complex environments,
- Transport strategy and policy,
- Corporate strategy and European Union policies,
- Internationalization theory; transaction cost economics; dynamic capabilities; multinational enterprises; subsidiary specific advantage; firm specific advantages (FSAs), country specific advantages (CSAs)
Location
Dr. Alain Verbeke FRSC is a Professor of International Business Strategy. He holds the McCaig Chair in Management at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. For over a decade, he has served as the Inaugural Alan M. Rugman Memorial Fellow at the Henley Business School. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Solvay Business School, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Several of his novel concepts, inter alia location-bound firm-specific advantages, subsidiary-specific advantages, bounded reliability, bifurcation bias, and MNE regional-strategy focus (developed with the late Alan Rugman), are now widely used in multinational management thinking. As part of his vast oeuvre, he has authored or edited over 30 international business books and contributed over 65 substantive pieces to AJG 4/4* journals. ScholarGPS (2026) has ranked him third in the world for International Business (‘Business Studies’) and twelfth in the world for Strategic Management (lifetime among active scholars).
Alain has served two full terms as Editor-in-Chief of JIBS (2017 – 2022), during which he led an expert editorial team that positioned the journal as the hub of an ecosystem of IB/IM journals and the premier venue for respectful, intellectual dialogue on critical IB/IM challenges. He has received the double Gold Medal for intellectual and service contributions to JIBS, as well as the Exemplary Service Award, from the AIB. His many service contributions to various professional organizations include his role as Co-Chair and Principal Program Organizer of the SMS 2023 Global Conference in Toronto: ‘Aligning Strategy, Corporate Governance, and Resource Allocation in Turbulent Environments.’ He also co-edited 11 volumes of the Progress in International Business Research (PIBR) book series in service of EIBA. Alain has successfully supervised 31 doctoral students. As a Reading School scholar, he is an advocate for evidence-based IB/IM research and teaching, and an ardent defender of globalization and the efficiency-properties of multinational enterprise governance.
He was elected a Fellow of the AIB (2007), EIBA (2019) and the Royal Society of Canada (2024).
Strategy and International Business
This course is intended for doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. This is an advanced course focused on the theory of the multinational enterprise (MNE), and its implications for international strategic management....
Most recent news & media
Dr Verbeke has been a member of the European Science and Technology Assembly (ESTA), the highest advisory body to the European Commission on the future of European scientific and innovation policy and has served on the board of directors of various educational and scientific research institutions. He is a leading thinker on complex project evaluation, the strategic management of multinational networks, as well as the governance and restructuring of complex organisations.
In the consulting sphere, Dr. Verbeke has personally directed over 100 strategic management projects, most of these with a focus on the interface between large-scale investment programs and governance challenges. His academic research agenda consists of revisiting, rethinking and augmenting the core paradigms in strategic management and international business, especially internalization theory, which is a joint transaction cost economics and resource based view of the firm, focused on the governance of new resource combinations. He has particular expertise in the management of headquarters - subsidiary relationships and broader governance challenges in large multinational enterprises.
Dr Verbeke has authored or edited more than 30 books and more than 200 refereed publications, including many articles in leading scholarly journals such as the Journal of International Business Studies, the Strategic Management Journal and the Journal of Management Studies.
Dr Alain Verbeke studies extensions of internalization theory and this theory's many applications to a wide variety of international business phenomena, such as the internationalization of family firms, the creation of subsidiary specific advantage, the impact of regional integration on entry mode choices, the growth of emerging economy multinational enterprises, the rise of international new ventures, etc.
Internalization theory is a joint transaction cost economics (TCE) and resource based view (RBV) interpretation of the firm’s functioning, infused with entrepreneurial judgement elements, and taking into account the institutional characteristics of home and host countries. Here, firms make strategic decisions to expand, based on an initial set of firm specific advantages (FSAs), which can themselves be the result of prior investments in, e.g., R&D or brands, or may result from managerial experience, superior managerial practices, etc., in a context of substantial bounded rationality and bounded reliability. Importantly, there is a focus on the dynamics of requisite resource recombination across product and geographic space, whereby three related questions need to be answered in a systemic fashion: What are the optimal firm-level boundaries? How to govern the interface with economic actors conducting relevant activities outside of the firm’s boundaries? How to govern the activities conducted inside the firm’s boundaries?
The above approach is closely aligned with the modern, dynamic capabilities (DC) perspective in the field of strategy, since successful firms are predicted to be the ones able to engage systematically in the requisite entrepreneurial resource recombination associated with, e.g., each individual expansion move or allocation of a role to an individual foreign subsidiary. However, dynamic capabilities thinking must always be subjected to the discipline of efficient governance, so as to avoid creating simplistic normative models, and it is this requisite interplay between governance and dynamic capability development that merits research attention.
Specialisms
- International business strategy in complex environments
- Transport strategy and policy
- Corporate strategy and European Union policies
- Internationalization theory; transaction cost economics; dynamic capabilities; multinational enterprises; subsidiary specific advantage; firm specific advantages (FSAs), country specific advantages (CSAs)