Over the last decade or more foreign direct investment intended to augment the existing O or competitive advantages of firms has become an increasingly important form of cross-border economic activity, as, indeed, has the growth of inter-firm strategic alliances. Both forms of transborder economic involvement reflect the perceived need by firms domiciled in one country not only to capture the technological and marketing synergies offered by firms in other countries, but also, more generally, to harness or tap into the created assets of foreign competitors, suppliers, customers and those offered by national educational and innovatory systems.
I have set out elsewhere (Dunning, 2000b), I believe although the search for newly created assets adds a new dimension to our thinking about the rationale for FDI, and can only be explained by a reconfiguration of traditional OLI variables, the essential postulates of the eclectic paradigm still remain intact and valid irrespective of the motive for MNE activity, its extent, pattern and form still rest on the interaction between the O -specific advantages of investing firms ± including the willingness and ability of such firms to access new assets and coordinate these with their existing assets ± and the advantages of countries and also on the relative costs and benefits of engaging in this interaction by alternative modes of governance and noticeably that of administrative fiat (i.e. I advantages)