International business professor receives Academy of Management Award
The Academy of Management’s International Management Division presented KU professor Minyoung Kim with its Best Paper in Global Strategy Award. His paper, “Multicountry and Multifirm Colocation: A Network Approach,” was honored during the academy’s annual meeting earlier this month.

Kim, assistant professor of management and international business at the School of Business, focused his paper on colocation. Colocation refers to when firms choose to operate in the same host countries as their competitors in the process of internationalization.
Kim’s paper introduced a new concept of colocation as an inter-firm network. When Firm A invests into Country 1, we can think of their relationship as a link. When Firm A and Firm B are colocating in Country 1, we can conceptualize the colocation as an inter-firm link between Firm A and Firm B via Country 1. When you expand this to include colocations of multiple firms across multiple countries, you have an inter-firm network, he explained.
“There are two important dimensions in this network: intensity and diversity,” Kim said. “The intensity refers to how frequently a firm encounters the same colocators around the world. The diversity of colocation refers to the number of firms a firm colocates with around the world.”
Some firms repeatedly colocate with a small number of competitors in multiple countries (called multi-country colocation), while others colocate with diverse competitors with less repetition (called multi-firm colocation).
The paper investigated how these two types of colocation influence firm performance. Kim found firms perform better when they have high intensity and low diversity or high diversity and low intensity. Kim also found that the degree of firm internationalization and market structure jointly influence the type of multi-colocations, which in turn influences firm performance.
“Understanding the nature of different types of multi-colocations and their performance implications can help managers better implement global expansion strategies,” Kim said. “Specifically, this study can help managers better understand whether or when to follow or systematically avoid competitors when choosing locations in the process of internationalization.”
The International Management Division’s Best Paper in Global Strategy Award is presented to the best scholarly paper submitted to the division focusing on global strategy at the Academy of Management’s annual meeting.
Papers by Clint Chadwick, management area director and professor of strategy and human resources management, and Niki den Nieuwenboer, assistant professor of organizational behavior and business ethics, were also honored in their respective Academy of Management divisions.

